The Kakarotte Factor
by Echelon
Summary: Chapter Eight up! Nappa tries to elicit his long-overdue revenge from a drastically changed Vegeta, Goku is rescued from her underwear shopping spree, and down in Hell, Shin and Kibito finally confront a Saiyan named Bardock...and his family.
1. Prologue: A Card Game in Hell

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* * *

The Kakarotte Factor  
by Echelon  


* * *

  


* * *

Prologue:  
A Card Game in Hell  


* * *

There were no cards in Hell, so they ambushed an unfortunate fellow resident, of a species that sported leathery skin dusted with speckles that resembled—if one looked very, very closely—the wanted diamonds, hearts, spades, and clovers. 

He would live, of course; one of the truly hellish things about Hell was that death was no longer an option for escape. After his attackers had taken most of the skin covering his elongated skull and forearms and cut them into fifty two rectangular strips, he'd lain there, waiting until they were well and truly out of sight, and around him Hell's inhabitants picked their way carefully past the pools of bright red-purple blood without so much as a glance at their source. As soon as he was sure his tormentors had left, he scrabbled back into the shadows, a pitiable lump of mangled limbs and gleaming viscera. 

And somewhere in the middle of Hell, four of its most notorious tenants began a round of something that bore a remarkable resemblance to Earth poker. 

The game didn't really begin to heat up until King Cold remarked, very off-handedly, that Babidi was planning to resurrect Buu. 

"Buu?" Frieza leveled him a sharp look from the rim of his cards. "You mean, Majin Buu?" 

"The very same one." 

"Majin Buu is a myth," spat Frieza. "A character from one of my bedtime stories from when I was a child." 

"Oh, no, son. I'm afraid he's very much real." His father pressed the tip of his index finger against his cheek, the movement lazy and calculated. "He was just...well before your time. Before mine." 

Frieza wasn't wholly convinced, but one of the names mentioned tickled at his subconscious. "Who is this Babidi, then?" 

"Bibidi's son." 

Cell whistled. He possessed King Cold's cells, which made him privy to almost every scrap of knowledge he had had prior to his own birth. "So the most powerful wizard in the universe has a son. Who would've thought." 

Frieza scanned his deck—a two of spades, a four of clovers, a seven of hearts, a five of hearts, and an eight of diamonds—and slapped it down with a snort. "I fold." He glowered at his father as though he were responsible for the motley hand. "And just where did you come up with this information, Father?" 

"I have my means," was the cool response, and the others did not doubt him. King Cold had not been an interstellar lord for millennia without knowing what went on around him, and his penchant for being in the know had evidently survived his transition to the afterlife. "Word has it in the Demon World is that Babidi's going to come for Dabura." 

"The king of the Demon World himself," Frieza muttered. 

The Demon World was a shadow reality, a level above the one they currently resided in. It was where Hell found its overseers, demons who agreed to descend from their plane to control the chaos of the one below. The ones Frieza and Cell had tangled with in their short-lived bid for their new afterworld no doubt hailed from there; they had been fat and indolent and corrupt, pathetic pushovers who were completely unworthy of their positions as the sovereigns of this damned place. The defeated demons had hurled threats at them, most of which involved their sort-of king, a demon they called Dabura, coming to kick their collective behinds. Heaven had intervened before either Cell or Frieza could have the privilege of meeting him. 

"He can do that?" blurted out Paragus, completely forgetting to feign meekness before the other three. "This Babidi...he can enlist someone from the Demon World, just like that?" 

"The demons seem to think so," King Cold answered evenly. "According to the old stories, his father was once accompanied by two demons he had summoned straight from the Demon World with the help of a portal he opened with his magic. If Babidi is anything like him, he should be able to do the same." 

Cell pressed his cards facedown, very methodically, on the tabletop. "I fold." He folded his arms, then put forth the question that had been tapping timidly at the back door of his companions' minds. "Is there a reason you are telling us this?" 

King Cold leaned back. "Wouldn't you want a chance to return? To get out of here, to go back to wrecking planets, terrorizing their inhabitants, ruling the universe..." A gleam surfaced in his eyes. "...getting revenge?" 

Before any of the others could offer a rejoinder, his son released a loud, indelicate snort. "You forget, Father, that I remember the stories as well as you. Bibidi's underlings paid a hefty price for their subservience. Their power was increased, yes, but their minds were no longer their own." A corner of his black-lipped mouth lifted, but only slightly. "Sure, it might be fun to go back, surprise certain people before annihilating them where they stand, but what's the point of returning when you're under someone else's control?" 

"Oh." If King Cold was disappointed, he didn't show it. "When you put it like that..." He turned his attention back to his neglected deck. "Well, it seemed like a good shot at getting out of this place. Well, gentlemen, I'd like to call, if you please." 

Paragus's hand consisted of a king, a jack, a seven, four, and three of diamonds. King Cold had an ace, a ten, a five, a three, and a two of hearts. The mustachioed Saiyan watched without much candor as King Cold raked the pot toward him with a small cackle. 

Cell took over as dealer, and began to shuffle. "So," he said conversationally. "Where _was_ Majin Buu all this time, anyway?" 

King Cold inspected his hand with exaggerated interest and pretended to think for a moment. "Earth." 

Frieza barked out a laugh, the sound cutting and strangely hysterical. "Of all the hiding places in the universe, it had to be that mudball of a planet! What a truly _delicious_ coincidence." 

His father had to agree: Earth had been his graveyard, his and his son's. An insignificant, primitive world had played tomb to not one, but two intergalactic tyrants—not that there had been enough of their remains to bury. It might have been funny, King Cold thought wryly, had it not been so personal. 

"I must say, I'm almost sorry Son Goku is no longer around to confront this Majin Buu," remarked Cell, almost casually. 

To someone oblivious to the shared history of those clustered around the table, the change in ambiance might've gone undetected. Being as it was, all four were aware of it as surely as though it had been something tangible. 

"You _know_," King Cold said, somehow managing to sound bored and confidential at the same time, "from what I've heard from around these parts, this Goku fellow has already been to Heaven, Hell, and back. What makes you think he won't be able to that again if he really wanted to return?" 

Frieza regarded him piercingly, his chalk-white face set like cement. "What is he," he snapped, "an immortal?" 

King Cold tilted his head and rubbed his chin. "Perhaps you should ask him," he told his son coyly, "seeing as you seem to admire him so much." 

"Don't be ridiculous, Father." Frieza flicked a couple of his poker chips into the center pile, a little too forcefully. He hated it when his father got like this. "He was nothing but a dirty little monkey, and I do not admire dirty little monkeys." 

Paragus matched Frieza's raise with some of his own chips. The lizard's derogatory epithet went over his head; why, indeed, should he take offense? His people had mutilated him and left him to die for the sole crime of fathering a child that surpassed the prince in power. Paragus had renounced his race many times as he'd lain in that dark, cellar-like room, his mangled body lying alongside his infant son, the both of them waiting to die. 

They probably would have, too, if it hadn't been for Frieza's timely destruction of planet Vegeta, an event that had triggered Brolly's formidable powers, which in turn had spared them from going the way of their ill-fated planet. 

So no, he didn't mind King Cold and Frieza. If anything, he was rather grateful to Frieza for disposing of his would-be murderers. Furthermore, they were scintillating company compared to the frustrated, mediocre, shiftless gofers that crawled the atriums of Hell. 

"Oh,_ really_." King Cold's voice was soaked with unwanted meaning. "Then what's this I hear about you hitting on the 'dirty little monkey' while you fought him on Namek?" 

The table shuddered as Frieza slammed down his deck, scattering cards and poker chips, and stared at his father with protuberant eyes. "Father," he said with deceptive calmness, "the man humiliated me and nearly killed me, and you are accusing me of being attracted to him?" 

His outburst did not extinguish the teasing glint in his father's eyes. "Mm...I suppose that makes sense. Still, there were those at your old headquarters who were monitoring your fight with this Super Saiyan of yours, and they absolutely swear they saw you hit on him." 

"I did nothing of the sort!" shrieked Frieza, and a purple-red tinge diffused through the milky skin of his face. 

" 'We could've been so good together,' " King Cold recited verbatim, enjoying the sight of his son's supreme embarrassment. "Really, Frieza, only you could decide to flirt with the enemy in a duel to the death." 

Frieza spluttered incoherently, and Cell spoke without lifting his eyes from his deck. "To be honest, King Cold, I don't blame him. That Goku can be quite charming. For a low-life, inferior organic being, anyway." 

"Goku..." Paragus stroked his beard thoughtfully; he had heard that name before. "Ah, yes...the bane of my own son's existence. Kakarrot." 

King Cold bared his teeth at the Saiyan in a facsimile of a smile. "Well, well. That's something we have in common, don't we?" He picked idly at his incisors with the corner of one of his cards. "The bane of both our sons' existences is the infamous Goku-Kakarrot. I'm still disappointed I never got to meet the man my son was so obsessed with." 

_My son, and half of Hell,_ he added mentally. It was easy to tell the pecking order in this wretched place: the ones at the top of the Underworld hierarchy—the ones worth knowing—were all well acquainted with Son Goku, a.k.a. Kakarrot. 

Cell and Paragus had been two of those people. 

The android was a powerhouse, one of Hell's most prominent and most fearsome denizens, having earned that rank by being only the second person with the distinction of having once killed Son Goku. By contrast Paragus was a lightweight; in terms of power level he was far below Frieza's and King Cold's league. But he had Brolly, and Brolly, bereft of his vengeance against Kakarrot, was once again his obedient son. 

"I was not obsessed, _Father_." 

"Of course not, son." King Cold smiled condescendingly at his simmering offspring. "That's why you dragged me to the other end of the universe to annihilate him, his family and his backwater planet, and got ourselves killed in the process." His contemplated his hand, thought it satisfactory, and laid it face-up on the tabletop: a flush. "I call." 

Frieza had a three of a kind, and though Paragus's hand was decidedly less impressive—one pair—he barely noticed; his mind was no longer on the game. 

"You think that's obsessed," volunteered the Saiyan. "My brat loses any semblance of sanity if you so much as mention Kakarrot's name in front of him. At times his entire vocabulary consists of 'Kakarrot'." 

"My, my. It seems Goku's got quite a fan club down here." Cell displayed his hand: a straight flush. King Cold clucked his tongue in disappointment, and Cell proceeded to sweep up the pot. "I don't suppose you've run into my creator yet. The man spied on Goku for twenty years, trying to figure out his weakness so that he could kill him. _Twenty years_. Now that's determination." The android smiled, shark-like. "Or obsession." 

"Did he find one?" asked Frieza. He seemed to have calmed down a bit, and was now tapping a purple-black fingernail against the tabletop and trying very hard not to look like he cared about the answer. "A weakness, I mean." 

Once again, Cell played dealer. "Other than the fool's willingness to sacrifice himself for his friends, no." He distributed the cards, his fingers moving with the dexterity of one used to intercepting blows coming at near-sonic speeds. "Gero thought of using his family as leverage once, but he changed his mind when he heard what happened to Garlic Jr. Quite a shame, really. The surest way to kill him without involving him in conflict is to annihilate his family. Unfortunately for us all, his family is just as deadly as he is. Ante up, gentlemen." 

Chips were pushed to the middle, and King Cold tsk-tsked as he swept his gaze over his new deck. "This Goku really must be some kind of fellow. I take it back, son—perhaps you _do_ have good taste." 

"For the last time, Father," Frieza ground out through gritted teeth, "drop it. He's not even the right gender." 

"Ah, but neither are you, but you don't see me bitching about it, hmm?" 

Cell threw his head back and laughed, uproariously, before tossing a couple of chips into the center pile. Paragus added some of his own chips, his features twitching with suppressed hilarity. 

Impervious to his son's death-glare, King Cold went on: "To tell you the truth, I would not have stood in your way had you decided to run away with this Goku. Imagine it: my son, intergalactic tyrant, and the most powerful being in the universe! It really is too bad he's not 'the right gender', as you so eloquently put it." 

Frieza merely snarled and matched their bets. 

Cell found King Cold's statement even more amusing than the earlier one. "Ah, if only the great Son Goku had been a female! Now that would've been be much, much easier on all of us." 

"That it would," commented Paragus, knowing he had uttered the biggest understatement this side of the afterlife. Female Saiyans were the essential minority of Saiyan society, nothing more than walking reproductive units with half the strength and therefore half the value of a Saiyan male. 

Cell had stopped laughing, and was now shaking his head. "Unfortunately, gentlemen, it's a bit too late for us to dwell upon the might-have-beens. So let's not talk about Goku any more, hmm? It appears some of us still have some unresolved issues with the man," he remarked, motioning his head toward Frieza, whose concentration on the game was belied only by the hairline fractures appearing at the edges of his cards. 

"You have no idea," muttered King Cold, inspecting his surly son. 

Cell turned back to his deck. "Incidentally, King Cold, what gender _is_ Frieza, anyway?" 

"Well, he is officially a male," the former tyrant answered, affectionately patting the top of his progeny's round head. Frieza made a horrible disapproving noise and ducked away. "Of course, there was some confusion with the doctors during his birth, like what happened with his big brother—you _have_ met Cooler around here, haven't you? He's quite a lad, but not quite into that whole interplanetary rule thing. Not surprising that that Goku fellow killed him not once but twice. Now Cooler's a strong one, just not as driven as my boy Frieza here. But he was quite certainly a male, which is, I'm afraid, more than I can say for Frieza—at least Cooler never got into one of those mood swings, or put the moves on someone like that strong, strapping, dirty little Saiyan." 

"Father, could you kindly just _shut the hell up_!" 

Cell chortled, slapping at his knee, but Paragus merely wiped a suddenly sweaty hand on his lap. He was too busy thinking of Majin Buu and his son, both of whom lived for chaos, and Kakarrot. 

* * *

Vegeta was enraged. 

Usually, that was nothing new: anger was the Saiyan prince's state of mind ninety-nine percent of the time, and the emotion was generally instigated by the thought or presence of a certain third-class Saiyan. 

The difference this time, however, was that Kakarrot had actually chosen to induce his wrath by announcing, more or less, that he was forsaking their duel for some vague menace that purple-skinned little punk and his companion had most probably dreamed up. Even now the fool was starting off toward the ring, all pumped up and ready to follow that accursed Supreme Kai or whoever the hell he claimed he was, and leaving the prince to fester here as though their fated, inevitable rematch meant nothing! 

Vegeta let out a snarl and began to stalk toward the younger Saiyan. For years the only thing that had sustained him through something close to a life on this mediocre planet was the prospect that one day he would face Kakarrot and show him the true difference between a low-class and a prince. But their rematch would be postponed many times as Kakarrot found himself distracted by other things—Frieza, the androids, Cell, and then, death. And now, just as Vegeta had thought there was nothing more the universe could dish out for an obstacle, in waltzed Shin, who had the audacity to believe that he could sidetrack Kakarrot from his destiny with news of yet another adversary to preoccupy the other Saiyan. 

Well, no more! Vegeta had gone through enough mental torment, enough battering of his pride, and enough years of waiting, and he was not about to have Kakarrot's attention whisked away from him by something as insignificant as a threat to Earth. 

"I know what you're doing, Kakarrot! You're trying to skip out on our next match, aren't you?" 

The other Saiyan glanced at him, his expression apologetic. "Vegeta," he began in that pragmatic, 'let's-humor-the-prince' tone Vegeta so hated, "can't you see that there's something more important going on here?" 

A growl tore its way out of Vegeta's throat at the blasé reply, and he seized Kakarrot by his shirtfront. "You listen! After the next two matches, we are scheduled to fight! And you _will _fight me, so if you leave, you had better come back! I only entered this tournament so that I could beat—" 

He was cut off, rather rudely, when Kakarrot fell on him. 

Vegeta's reflexes kicked in, and he roughly shoved the other Saiyan off of him without releasing his hold on the latter's gi. Kakarrot's head bobbed, almost drunkenly, and his chin slumped against his chest. Vegeta scowled at the mass of unruly black spikes. 

"Kakarrot, what the _hell_ do you think you're doing?" he shrieked. 

"Sorry, Vegeta." 

Vegeta whipped about angrily, straining to see who dared butt into his conversation with Kakarrot. Baldy had just arrived from the back of the contestants' area, and the Namek was twenty feet away from them. The rest of the tournament's fighters were lounging around inside the tent and paying more attention to the happenings in the arena than him and Kakarrot. The blonde android was nowhere in sight. 

So who the hell had just spoken? 

"I—I lost my balance." 

There it was again, that disembodied, annoyingly dulcet voice, but there was no one within speaking range, or even within hearing range. To add to his confusion, the voice seemed to be issuing from right in front of him, which did not make sense at all, since the only one there close to him was— 

Vegeta grabbed a handful of thick pointed hair and yanked unceremoniously backwards, forcing up Kakarrot's head. 

"Ow! Vegeta, that hurt—" 

The person staring incredulously down at him was a stranger's. No, not a stranger's: the hair was Kakarrot's, the clothes, the expression—but the face and body were not. The pupils of the eyes were bigger, the facial structure less chiseled, the frame decidedly smaller. His dread mounting, Vegeta relaxed his grip on the stranger's hair and dropped his eyes—then wished he hadn't, because his other fist was still curled tightly around the other Saiyan's shirtfront, pulling the collar down low enough for him to glimpse the silhouettes of two plump mounds underneath. 

Vegeta's stomach did a violent downward triple-flip. He jerked back, abruptly releasing his hold on the stranger, who staggered backwards. "Who—what have you done with—this is—what kind of sick _joke_ is this?" he roared. 

"Joke?" The Kakarrot imposter—it couldn't be Kakarrot, not with those narrow shoulders, those slim arms, and that _chest_—lost her struggle to stay upright and fell on her butt. The action seemed to jar her out of her puzzlement; she glanced down slowly at herself, the color draining from her complexion. 

Shin materialized at Vegeta's shoulder, sounding only slightly impatient. "Do you two intend to come along or not?" he asked, just before he became aware of the newcomer sitting on the ground. His brows knitted into an expression of bewilderment not quite matching that of the Saiyan prince's. "Who are you?" he queried. "And where's Goku?" 

The stranger raised a hesitant hand, letting it hover, half-clenched, next to her throat. "It's me," she said, and to Vegeta it sounded as though she were trying to convince herself of that even more than them. "I'm Goku." 

From somewhere out in the audience came a lady's shrill, eardrum-rattling scream—no doubt incited by the Gohan-Kibito drama currently unfolding in the ring—but it seemed a more appropriate response to this newest development than anything either the dumbstruck Shin or Vegeta might have attempted. 

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End of Prologue  


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**Closing Notes:** All right, all right, so this was inspired by a _Dragonball_ doujinshi. It'll be like the sole Goku gender-switch story amongst the oodles and oodles of Vegeta gender-switch stories. Why has no one thought of this before, anyway? Oh, and I was weaned on the English dub on Cartoon Network, so there's no "Toranksu" or "Buruma" stuff. Tough. 

Anyways, expect a lot of familiar returning faces and irritably slow updates. Sorry—I got a job, an internship, and I am currently applying into a new college, thus the molasses pacing. Later! 


	2. One: Enigma

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The Kakarotte Factor  
by Echelon  


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Chapter One:  
Enigma  


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"...so we allowed him to lie dormant. If our actions _had _caused him to be released, we would have been powerless to stop him." 

Shin paused, allowing the weighty revelation sink into his companions' heads, and the four of them flew on in somber silence. For some moments the only sound was the whooshing of air currents and the rustling of their wind-whipped clothes. 

The quiet dragged on interminably, and Krillin glanced around at the rest of the troop. Piccolo appeared more severe than usual and there was an additional tic to Vegeta's perpetually pissed-off countenance. No doubt what Shin had said had affected them somewhat, but it became clear that there was also something else on their minds, judging from the way Piccolo cast a surreptitious glimpse over his shoulder—a movement that was quickly mimicked by the Saiyan prince. 

Krillin didn't have to follow their line-of-sight to know just who they were looking at. 

Bringing up the rear of the group was Goku—_not Goku! Goku doesn't look like that!_ Krillin's hyperventilating subconscious protested—seemingly oblivious to the furtive looks she—_she!_—was being pelted with. She was being rather subdued, a far cry from the Goku who took the lead during the direst of scenarios, who never failed to offer his needed input on upcoming conflicts, and didn't hesitate to ask the questions that needed to be asked. 

Instead, this version of Goku had said very little throughout the whole trip, leaving the last task to Krillin. It was understandable, of course; the tall Saiyan was probably still stunned from what had happened to her, and hadn't had any time to fully digest its consequences. According to Shin, there was an unknown evil lurking at the end of Yamu's and Spopovich's trail, and there was no time for anyone to diddle around trying to figure out the 'who' and the 'why' behind the sudden gender switch. And Goku, being the kind of person he—_she_—was, saw no problem in putting the needs of the world before her own. 

From thereon no further reference had been made to Goku's current unnatural condition throughout the entire flight. But it was painfully apparent that the subject wasn't far from everyone else's minds. 

Including Shin's. 

"Goku, do you have any idea who could've done this to you?" the Supreme Kai asked, shattering the relative quiet with his non sequitur. 

Four pairs of eyes swung toward the Saiyan in question. Goku was blinking rapidly, as though surprised at the question. "Well...not really, no." 

Piccolo snorted. "You mean aside from all those maniacs you've defeated over the years who've been waiting quite a while to get back at you?" 

"Um...why would they get back at me by turning me into a woman?" Goku questioned. 

Vegeta twitched, but kept his gaze firmly fixed ahead of him. 

"Goku's got a point, though," ventured Krillin. "I mean, turning your worst male enemy into a girl's not exactly the ultimate revenge." Goku shot him a look, and Krillin added quickly, "Okay, that's pretty bad, but c'mon, there're worse things. Besides, who'd be capable of doing something like this?" 

"Babidi could," Shin piped up abruptly. "This is the kind of thing he'd be able to do in his sleep." 

"Wait a minute! Are you saying that what happened to me might be connected to Babidi?" Goku asked, genuinely astounded. 

"Well, I wouldn't rule it out. It's certainly a possibility," replied the Supreme Kai, his tone taking on an even grimmer cadence. "Doesn't it seem too much of a coincidence that this occurred during this tournament just before you decided to assist Kibito and I?" 

"That doesn't make any sense," scoffed Piccolo. "What reason could this wizard have for turning Goku female?" Inwardly, he agreed with Krillin: if this was supposed to be some kind of punishment, it seemed like a pretty ineffectual one. He couldn't see what the big deal was with having two opposing genders. Then again, perhaps that was just his own asexuality speaking. 

"Maybe he wanted to rattle Goku, throw us off maybe?" suggested Krillin. 

"But why me?" Goku argued. She had forgotten to be subdued, and was drifting closer to the front of the group. "How would Babidi even know who I was?" 

"That's a good point," Shin allowed. "I don't recall Babidi ever having been anywhere near this quadrant of the universe for millennia. He couldn't have known of you." 

"Then perhaps this had nothing to do with Kakarott in the first place," Vegeta spoke up, sounding tetchy. He didn't want to think about what it could mean if his rival's sex change did turn out to be someone's twisted idea of revenge. "Perhaps it had nothing to do with Babidi at all. Did any of you think of that?" 

Shin looked pensive. "Perhaps you're right." 

"Then who?" Krillin wanted to know. 

"The dragonballs," Goku offered. "Do you think it's possible someone made a wish with the dragonballs?" 

Piccolo shook his head. "If someone had summoned the Eternal Dragon, we all would've been able to tell." 

Krillin glanced over at the more taciturn of the Saiyans. "Hey, Vegeta. You were the only one who saw Goku back at the tournament just before he, uh...turned into a girl. Did you see how it happened?" 

Vegeta emitted an annoyed sound. He had been running the incident through his mind over and over ever since the lot of them had blasted off from the tournament, and he knew no more about it now than he did back then. "There was nothing to see! Kakarrot and I were having a conversation, then the fool fell on me, and when he stood back up, he was a she. That was it. No one else was nearby. No fireworks, no clap of thunder, no puff of smoke, nothing, nada, zilch." 

"Nothing?" Krillin shifted his gaze toward the party in question. "So...can you tell us how it happened, Goku?" 

"Actually, it's just as Vegeta said." Goku pulled up slightly to the left behind Shin, who was in the lead. "I was talking, then all of a sudden it was as if I couldn't balance myself on my own two feet. I didn't feel anything weird, like I was morphing or anything like that. I didn't even notice when my voice changed. It was just that subtle." 

Krillin stared at the back of his best friend's head. He didn't think _subtle_ was the word to describe the change. 

"That's it, then," Piccolo murmured with some dissatisfaction. "Obviously, we're not going to figure this out right now. Perhaps we should revisit this mystery later." 

"Agreed," Goku said. She looked down, noting that they were now passing over a canyon. "Let's concentrate first on Babidi and this Majin Buu, and then—" 

She was interrupted by a familiar male voice calling from an approaching distance. 

"Hey, Dad, we're here!" 

Krillin twisted to look over his shoulder. "Look! It's Gohan!" 

Goku broke into a wide grin. "It's about time you caught up!" 

Behind them, Gohan's smile faltered. For a second he could've sworn that his father sounded like a...he pushed the errant thought away and maneuvered himself between his father's familiar orange-clad form and Piccolo's mantle-clad figure. Kibito flew up to Shin's right side, and the two exchanged nods. 

"We've been waiting for you," Piccolo told the teenager sternly. 

Gohan grinned at his former mentor's usual low-key brand of affection. "Thank you." 

"Glad you're here," his father said—only it didn't sound like his father at all. In fact, it sounded more like Videl than his father... 

Puzzled, Gohan took a long good look at the figure to his immediate right—and nearly fell out of the sky when he saw the familiar—and at the same time alien—face grinning at him. 

"Duh-dah-d-d-d-d—" 

"Will someone finish what the brat's saying before he forgets the word?" Vegeta yelled out irritably. 

"Gohan." Piccolo grabbed at the flabbergasted teenager's sleeve as he began to wobble. 

"Yo, Gohan, are you okay?" Krillin demanded. 

But the young man barely heard them; he was too busy gawking at whoever that was with his father's clothes and his father's features. "Dad..." His voice had somehow acquired a pitch it hadn't been able to reach since pre-adolescence. "Dad, is that you?" 

"Yeah." His father—dear Dende above, his _father!_—shrugged, her grin turning sheepish. "It's me." 

Gohan ran the confirmation through his adroit mind, replayed it forwards and backwards and in all its possible permutations, but it was no use; it simply refused to process. "Oh, I get it. This's gotta be a dream. I'm still in the ring with Spopovich and Yamu and Kibito and I'm dreaming up all this..." 

"Sorry, kid." Krillin threw him a tight smile. "You ain't dreaming. 'Sides, I don't think any one of us'd be able to dream up something this creative. Or this warped." 

Gohan slowly turned back toward the stranger to his right, trying to ignore the sensation of several optic recognition sensors in his brain fizzling out in frustration as they as strove to make a connection between his father and the (very obviously female) individual who was presently flying at his side. 

For all intents and purposes, Son Goku as a female was essentially the same in appearance as her male counterpart, save for the expected differences of body physiology and facial bone structure. This stranger's hair had the same distinctive arrangement of spikes, and she also had his father's large expressive eyes and his even-featured face, but they were all distinctly feminized. The orange gi, a comfortable fit on his tall, strapping father, sagged on her considerably smaller frame (except where they were stretched tautly over certain newly voluptuous areas—something Gohan queasily opted not to dwell on). Her armbands were loose, and her shoes looked like she'd pilfered them from her big brother. 

"D-dad...what happened to you?" 

"Well, son..." Goku adopted an exaggerated thinker's pose, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. "I seem to have been turned into a woman." 

"That's not funny, Dad." Gohan stared at his 'father's' arm: the now near-elbow-length sleeve of the orange gi had fallen back, exposing a slender, tapering limb that could not in any sane universe be connected to Son Goku. "I mean, why're you—who—did Spopovich and Yamu—" 

"No, Gohan, I don't think those two were involved in this," Shin reassured him. "At least, not directly. We're all still in the dark as to how and why this came about." 

"But..." 

"Take it easy, kid. As soon as we resolve this Majin Buu business, we'll find out who did this to your dad," intoned Piccolo. 

Gohan, still not convinced, glanced around earnestly at the others before finally zeroing in on Vegeta, who immediately barked, "Don't look at me, brat! What reason could I have for turning Kakarrot female?" 

"What reason indeed," Piccolo muttered. 

Vegeta shot him a 'would-you-care-to-repeat-that-so-I-can-kick-your-ass' glare, which the Namek returned coolly. Instinct told him that the Saiyan prince was being less than forthcoming regarding Goku's condition, though exactly what the prince was not being forthcoming about was something Piccolo could not put his finger on. Their glaring standoff was interrupted by Goku, who was addressing her firstborn. 

"Listen, don't worry about it, son," she was saying. "I'm not." 

Gohan observed his 'father' incredulously. "Uh...yeah. Okay. You're taking this really well, Dad." 

Goku laughed, a sound that might have lightened the company's spirits had it not been so dulcet and lilting and downright...feminine. "It's just a temporary thing, Gohan. I can live with being a girl for a couple of hours." 

_Yeah, but can everyone else?_ Krillin almost quipped, but he quashed it before it became verbal. Still, judging from the expressions of most of the people around him, the former monk could tell that a similar thought was circulating through their heads. 

All was quiet again until a minute later, when Shin announced, "Look! They're landing." 

Sure enough, Spopovich's and Yamu's ki-trails ended at a grassy knoll in the midst of the valley, a spot nearly obscured by the surrounding rocky cliffs. 

"But there's nothing out there!" Krillin objected. In all honesty, he wasn't even sure what he had been expecting of their destination, but he hadn't considered that the big, bad Majin Buu would be hiding out in a place so...ordinary. 

Kibito seemed perplexed. "That is odd. We have searched this entire area before." 

They all dropped down behind a huge outcrop of rock overlooking the dell. It was close enough for them to observe the goings-on below, and far enough for them to move about and converse among themselves without being spotted from the ground. 

"Everyone, suppress your energy," Shin instructed—rather unnecessarily, Gohan thought; the tactic had become reflex for the Earth team after years of battling ki-sensitive super-powered beings. "We don't want them to know we're here. Not just yet." 

Upon closer inspection, it was discovered that the valley floor wasn't deserted—far from it. In the midst of the green was a colossal circle of upturned earth, and in the midst of that, a dome-like structure the color of bone. 

Piccolo, having the keenest eyesight of the lot, was the first to spot something amiss with the tableau before them. "Are you sure Yamu and Spopovich're supposed to be meeting this Babidi person here?" 

"Yes. That structure you see over there's the top part of his spaceship. No wonder we couldn't find it when we were flying over! He must've buried the whole thing here!" Shin regarded him curiously. "Why do you ask?" 

The Namek nodded placidly toward the clearing. "Because their welcoming party seems to be quite...dead." 

"_What_?" Shin craned his neck forward, and the others swiftly followed his lead. 

There, in front of the structure's presumed entrance, stood Yamu and Spopovich. Hanging from the smaller man's slack grip was the lamp-like instrument they had used to siphon Gohan's Super Saiyan energy. They were peering at something on the ground that was partially blocked from the group's view by their grotesquely muscled legs. 

"Is that...a person?" gasped Krillin. 

As though on cue, the two thugs stepped back, verifying Krillin's observation: it _was _a person, though a decidedly odd-looking person at that. He was lying motionless on his stomach, his head twisted to one side. His skull was grossly elongated at the back, and he wore some sort of bone-like armor with spikes jutting out from his backside. Dark-hued blood streaked the violet skin of his noseless face and dripped from between his thick lips, validating Piccolo's earlier remark. 

"That's...one of Babidi's minions," Kibito answered, sounding acutely astonished. "The recruit he got from planet Voon." 

"Pui Pui," Shin supplied for him, sounding equally dumbfounded. "One of the most powerful fighters in the Eastern Galaxy." 

Vegeta harrumphed. "Sure doesn't look like it right now, does he?" 

They continued to watch as Spopovich and Yamu disappeared into the ship's entrance, only to exit a few minutes later, looking almost as confused as their onlookers. 

"But I don't understand!" Shin gripped at the rock in front of him. "Babidi should have been waiting for them here at his spaceship, but there seems to be no one there save for the corpse of one of his strongest recruits! What could have happened?" 

"I say we go down there and find out!" growled Vegeta. He didn't like having to hide in such close quarters with a gender-bent Kakarrot, and he was getting tired of the whole cloak-and-dagger routine. Not that he didn't see the merits of covertly evaluating an adversary before mounting an attack, but the only ones he could sense down there were Yamu and Spopovich, who, despite their Babidi-enhanced strength, hardly ranked worthy of his notice. 

Shin spun toward him. "Vegeta, we can't! This could be a trap!" 

"Babidi could just be keeping out of sight," Kibito joined in. 

Vegeta raised a disdainful eyebrow. "If he _is _down there, how come his own henchmen don't even seem to know where he is?" 

"I don't sense anyone else down there aside from those two," Gohan volunteered. "Can you, Piccolo?" 

"No." 

"Me, neither," Krillin seconded. 

Goku frowned down at the edifice, a tiny crease adorning the skin between her brows. Down below, Spopovich and Yamu were now wandering the site, presumably searching for their boss—or any other signs of life around the ship. 

"Hold on," Kibito warned. "Babidi's ship isn't any ordinary spacecraft. He could have modified it with special materials that could hide an individual's ki signature so that it can't be sensed from someone on the outside." 

"If that's true, then we should be able to get in the first strike, won't we?" shot back Vegeta, just before he vacated his hiding place and made a beeline for the clearing. 

"Vegeta, wait—!" Shin reached out a deterring arm toward the over-eager Saiyan, but it was fruitless; Vegeta was already halfway to the site. 

"Oh, well." Goku rose into the air and gave the Supreme Kai an apologetic smile. "We were gonna go down there sooner or later, right? Might as well be sooner." 

And with that, she rocketed down after Vegeta. 

"Dad!" Gohan went next, close at his 'father's' heels. 

Piccolo glanced around at the remnants of the group, then offered them a diffident shrug and went after the Saiyans. 

Krillin cracked his knuckles. "Aw, what the hell," he sighed, and followed suit. 

Kibito and Shin exchanged resigned looks, an action that belied their anxiousness, and swiftly moved to catch up with their impetuous new allies. 

* * *

End of Chapter One  


* * *

**Closing Notes:** Er, okay, so that was an unnecessarily long wait for a rather short chapter. The original Chapter One was much longer than this—fourteen pages and counting—so I cut it in two. Thus the first half's now Chapter One, and the second half becomes Chapter Two (which should be up by next week). I'm starting to see the merits of short chapters... 

Oh, and before I forget, thanks to S. Kyle for letting me borrow the 'Kakarotte' name from one of his _doujinshi_s. I really appreciate it! Oh, and if anyone's got a suggestion, comment, or whatever, could you, um, like, gimme a review? Feedback makes the chapters come faster, y'know! =) 


	3. Two: Ghost Ship

**Mailing List:** http://www.geocities.com/echelon002/ 

* * *

The Kakarotte Factor  
by Echelon  


* * *

  


* * *

Chapter Two:  
Ghost Ship  


* * *

"What's the matter? Did you misplace your boss or something?" 

Yamu whirled around. Standing some fifty yards away was a short, muscular man sporting a gravitationally impossible hairdo, a dark blue sleeveless fighting suit, and a wicked smirk. 

"Huh? Who are—" With a start, Yamu remembered: he'd seen him at the tournament; he had been one of the fighters in the competitors' tent. Behind him were several of the other fighters, among them the diminutive, lavender-skinned guy with the white Mohawk, the huge green pointy-eared man with the caped mantle and turban, and a young woman with the oddest haircut he had ever seen. Then again, he _had _seen that hair before, except the one sporting it had been a tall, well-built male... 

But he was digressing. 

"Spopovich! We got company!" 

His cohort dashed over from behind the building, his bloodshot eyes widening as he beheld the intruders. "You...!" 

Vegeta rolled his eyes. "Yes, us. Now I'm going to ask you straight out: where's your boss?" 

"How'd you know we were meeting Babidi here?" spluttered the larger thug. "Were you the ones who did this to—" 

"Be quiet, Spopovich, before you tell them everything!" Yamu snapped at him. He turned back toward the group, his posture growing even more menacing. "We got nothing to say to you, so if you all know what's good for you, you'll leave here and forget you ever saw this place." 

"Yeah, well, see, that's gonna be a problem," Goku remarked, her voice speciously casual. "I'm afraid we won't be able to leave until we have a word with your boss. You _do _know where he is, don't you?" 

Yamu gnashed his top and bottom lip together. "Aw, ain't that cute. The little lady tryin' to talk all tough." 

While Goku was busy blinking at this unfamiliar reception to one of her heroic speeches, Piccolo took up for her in his usual succinct manner. "We need to see Babidi. Now." 

There was a tense pause as the two factions regarded each other. Shin's eyes flickered between the two henchmen and the entrance of Babidi's vessel as though he were expecting the wizard to pop out at any moment. 

Finally Yamu carefully placed the container of energy he held on the ground behind him, safely out of his foes' reach. "Tell you what. We'll tell you all you wanna know"—he moved into a fighting stance—"_if _you manage to survive us." 

Spopovich mimicked his companion's action, the veins over his skull pulsing in anticipation. 

To Shin's and Kibito's dismay, none of the Saiyans seemed to have any objection to Yamu's challenge, least of all Vegeta. 

"If you insist," the prince answered on behalf of the assemblage. He marched forward, tugging at his gloves. "I'll be sure to make this quick—" 

He was stopped by Gohan, who held a dissuading arm out in front of him. "No, Vegeta, let me fight them. I got a score to settle." 

The older Saiyan scowled at him, but he eased grudgingly to one side, allowing the teenager access. It wasn't as though those two were any big loss. "Fine. They probably wouldn't last ten seconds with me, anyway." 

Goku grinned confidently at her son. "Go get 'em, Gohan." 

Gohan nodded his thanks at the both of them and advanced slowly toward the two over-muscled fighters. "Hey, guys. Remember me?" 

The muscles near Spopovich's right eye spasmed in recognition. It couldn't be...they'd bled him dry with that energy-sucking apparatus. But it was unmistakably him. "You're...the kid we ambushed..." 

"Bingo." Gohan's normally genial features had morphed into an immovable, hard-edged mask, a sure signal to all those who knew him that now was the time for his opponents to start fleeing. Unluckily for Yamu and Spopovich, neither of them knew Gohan that well. "I think you owe me a rematch." 

"If you want to join your friends fighting us, then be our guest," Yamu sneered, misinterpreting Gohan's words. 

Gohan shook his head. "Actually...I was thinking I'd take you both on by myself." 

Spopovich released a noise that was somewhere between a snort and a chortle. "You? By yourself?" 

"Why not? Listen, I won't even turn Super Saiyan. How's that sound?" 

At this, Kibito sent a dubious glance over at his unperturbed allies. "He's not going to transform?" 

"I know Gohan's strong," Shin put in, "but Spopovich's and Yamu's power levels have been greatly augmented by Babidi's magic. Without transforming, Gohan could be in big trouble. Are you sure that's such a good idea?" 

Piccolo's mouth stretched into an almost-smile. "Don't worry about it. Gohan's gotten a lot stronger since their last encounter in the ring." 

"Stronger...?" Shin trailed off in disbelief, then refocused his attention back toward the face-off. Yamu and Spopovich were now circling the young man in a manner not unlike that of wolves closing in on their prey. Gohan didn't even bother to track them with his eyes, instead continuing to stare straight ahead of him with unwavering calm. 

"Is that so?" mocked Yamu. "Kid, we don't give a damn whether you fight us with or without your Super-whatever transformation. Back at the tournament, you couldn't manage to escape from me and Spopovich even with your power. Either way, you don't stand a chance against the both of us." 

Gohan didn't bat an eyelid. "Why don't we find out?" 

Yamu let loose an inarticulate bellow, and the fight was on. 

Technically, it couldn't even be called a fight; the entire thing was entirely one-sided. Even without the benefit of Super Saiyan speed, Gohan evaded, ducked, and leaped over the combined attacks of his two adversaries without so much as a sound or even a change in expression. 

On the other hand, even with the benefit of Babidi's skills-boosting magic, Spopovich and Yamu looked as though they were fighting underwater. Compared to the fully in-control Gohan, the two minions were sluggish and sloppy and with each missed blow, more desperate. Every punch and kick they threw was rendered harmless even before it was halfway executed as Gohan blurred in and out with impunity. 

Shin and Kibito took it all in with open-mouthed wonder. The research they'd done before they'd arrived on Earth had focused solely on the power inherent in Super Saiyan forms, and thus knew little of what a modern Saiyan was capable of in his normal form. While it was a forgone conclusion that they were stronger than the average organic being, Shin and Kibito had no idea just how much stronger they were. 

Until now. 

Twin cries of agony erupted from the battlefield, and as the dust settled down around the brawlers, the onlookers were treated to the sight of Yamu and Spopovich, the former's fist planted in the latter's gut and latter's fist wedged between the former's cheek and shoulder. Their countenances were contorted in matching expressions of stunned pain as they faltered, then crumpled down to the ground. Gohan stood off a few feet to the side, completely unruffled, his back to them. 

Yamu uncoiled from his pain-wracked position and collapsed onto his belly. He raised his upper torso up on his elbows, glowering at the young man's back. "Cheating little son of a...that's right, runt...run," he gasped out. "All you got...is your speed..." 

Gohan turned then, and it was evident from the look on his face that he was done toying around. 

Unfortunately for Yamu, he missed the warning, and went right on talking. "...but I bet...you can't...hit...worth—" 

His rant was cut off when Gohan materialized in front of him and slugged him hard once across the jaw. 

"_That's_ for ambushing me..." 

Before Yamu could even hit the ground, he blurred out, re-appeared before the crouched-over Spopovich, and delivered a vicious ax kick down onto the enormous thug's spine. He went down like a boulder. 

"...and _this_," he finished with a snarl, "is for Videl!" 

And with that, the battle was over. 

* * *

Vegeta was the first to comment on the skirmish. "Hmph. Twenty-one seconds. The brat is slipping." 

Goku rose to her offspring's defense. "Aw, c'mon, Vegeta. Gohan was trying to give them a fair chance by not attacking right off." 

Out on the field, Gohan picked up the container Yamu had been holding. He weighed it in his hand, marveling at the warmth of his own energy inside. Without further ado, he crushed the front section of the device, closing his eyes as the trapped energy seeped back into its rightful owner. 

Meanwhile, Shin was eyeing the fallen thugs. "I think we better check on them." 

"Right," Goku agreed, and took a step forward. 

And stumbled. 

The fall was averted by Piccolo's grabbing a handful of the gi on her back. Goku regained her bearings and flashed the Namek a grateful smile. "Thanks, Piccolo." 

"Yeah," Piccolo grunted. He was a little taken aback by the dramatic difference in the Saiyan's weight; the Goku he'd grabbed had been unnaturally light, completely bereft of the male Goku's impressive muscle mass. It had not occurred to the Namek that this might be one of the effects of having Goku become female. Perhaps there _was _something to the whole disparate gender business, Piccolo mused. 

"Dad?" Gohan hurried over. 

Krillin wore a concerned frown as he surveyed his best friend. "What was that about, Goku?" 

"Are you all right?" Shin wanted to know. 

"Nothing. It's nothing. Sorry about that." Goku scratched the back of her head, embarrassed. "I just kinda forgot that my center of gravity's changed. That's why I fell on Vegeta that first time." 

"Your...center of gravity?" Piccolo inquired skeptically. 

"Oh! Um, wait, I learned about this," Gohan piped up. "It's actually very simple. Males and females have different equilibriums. I guess you're still trying to get used to balancing on your hips, huh, Dad?" 

"Yeah. I think I'll be fine now, though." As if to prove her point, she straightened up and walked out toward the field, her steps precise and experimental. 

Spopovich was breathing but unconscious, while Yamu was sprawled on his back, utterly incapacitated and groaning. The latter let out a pained gurgle as Kibito wrapped a beefy hand around his throat and hauled him to a half-sitting position. 

"I think it's about time we finish our conversation," rumbled the burgundy-skinned giant. "Now, for the last time: where is Babidi?" 

Yamu hacked, his bloodied lips parting as he tried to form words. He was missing both of his front teeth and one of his incisors. "...s'posed...t'be here...don't...know..." 

"_Where is he_?" The fingers tightened around the thickly corded neck. 

"...dddnnn...know...." 

"Kibito." Shin placed a mollifying hand on his huge companion's shoulder. "It's useless. He really doesn't know." 

Kibito glanced between Yamu's battered face and the Supreme Kai's somber expression, then released his grip. Yamu flopped back onto the ground and resumed his groaning marathon. 

"So they don't know where their boss is?" demanded Vegeta, sounding disgusted. "So that means the brat beat them up for nothing?" 

"Not for nothing." Gohan grinned, recalling the supreme satisfaction he'd gotten from smacking Spopovich around as hard as the latter had smacked Videl around. 

Piccolo, meanwhile, had made his way over toward the spaceship entrance, and was now studying the cadaver lying in front of it. "This one was killed with a ki-blast," he noted impassively. 

"A ki-blast?" Shin stared down at the battered form. There were soot-like patches all over the creature's torso, and some of the bone-like spines on his back had been broken off. Stamped over the crest of his protruding brows was the same stylized 'M' had had been branded on Yamu's and Spopovich's foreheads. "Then it must've been an extremely powerful one. It had to be. Anything less would not have killed someone like Pui Pui." 

"But who could've killed one of Babidi's minions?" Krillin wondered. "And why?" 

"Perhaps it was Babidi himself," suggested Kibito. "Perhaps he found no more use for Pui Pui, and decided to dispose of him." 

"That sounds just like him, all right, except for one thing. Babidi usually disintegrates those under his thrall," Shin reminded him gravely. "It's easier for him to dispose of those underlings he has under his control by causing them to explode rather than take them out in a blast of power. That taken into account, I'm not entirely certain that Babidi's responsible for this one." 

"What about Majin Buu?" queried Piccolo. "You said Babidi was working to free him, right? Could he have succeeded, then?" 

"It's not likely," Shin responded. "Like I mentioned, in order to 'hatch', that monster requires an enormous infusion of energy. We've ascertained that the only agents Babidi dispatched to gather the needed energy were Spopovich and Yamu. But since they did not meet with the wizard, I doubt Babidi has yet collected anything near the amount of power Buu needs to be freed." 

Vegeta kicked carelessly at the body, flipping it over. The Namek was right: the wounds were reminiscent of the aftereffects of a ki-missile this Pui Pui person had been hard-pressed to block. From experience culled from his old raiding days, Vegeta could tell that tell that the blast that had killed him wasn't even a particularly potent one; it was as if its source had been holding back— 

"It wasn't even a strong one." 

The Saiyan prince jerked up. Kakarrot had somehow slunk up beside him and was now peering at the corpse, apparently having reached the same conclusion as he. 

"It's as if whoever blasted him was just playing around with him," Kakarrot deduced, tossing him a grim smile. "Right, Vegeta?" 

Vegeta stared up at her, noting with extreme annoyance that even as a female she was still taller than he was—though now only by mere inches—then growled and went to put some distance between himself and the other Saiyan. 

"Playing around with Pui Pui?" Shin exclaimed. Pui Pui had been a genocidal mass murderer on Voon, and someone had accidentally killed him while playing around with him? "Who could be crazy enough to do that?" 

Goku glanced down at the body, then shrugged. "Well, Pui Pui wasn't very strong to begin with, poor guy," she remarked, and moved on, leaving Shin and Kibito slack-jawed. 

Gohan lingered at the ship's entryway, having spotted the 'M' insignia at its peak. His curiosity ignited, he poked his head inside. 

Shin spotted him and snapped out a warning. "Gohan, be careful! This could still be a trap!" 

The young demi-Saiyan paused, snuck a glimpse into the interior of the craft, and looked back at the Supreme Kai. "If it is, I think someone else set it off before us," he said. "Something's seriously messed up the inside." 

"It can't be!" Shin rushed over toward the entrance, Kibito and the others at his heels. 

The door opened into a deep vertical shaft. Its metal-like sides had been thoroughly shredded, and the air inside smelled of smoke. 

"What happened here?" breathed Shin. 

"Why don't we find out?" Piccolo suggested, and, before either Kibito or Shin could formulate a protest, leaped down into the passageway.

* * *

By the time Piccolo touched bottom, the unrelenting gloom had given way to brief instances of illumination. The room's interior lights were functioning, but only barely: a good number of them had been smashed, and the rest fizzed with the effort of trying to stay illuminated. As a result, the scene inside was revealed to Piccolo only by light-bursts that disrupted the darkness at erratic intervals. 

The room was shaped like the top half of a colossal dome, its ceiling looming high over his head, the tiny hole at its zenith the end of the shaft that he had just dropped down of. The whole thing might have appeared suitably impressive, had it not looked as though a Spirit Bomb had gone off inside of it. Heaps of wreckage dotted the sides and the center of the circular area. The walls were charred and pockmarked, and there were still wafts of smoke rising from the debris. 

His appraisal of the place was interrupted by the arrival of Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, Kibito, and Shin. The last two were visibly agitated. 

"I'm telling you, you are all severely underestimating Babidi's power! You simply can't keep charging in where..." Shin's diatribe faded as he took in the disaster area. "Wh-what in..." 

"Something—or some_one_—tore this place apart," Piccolo said, stating the obvious. His voice was thunderous within the wrecked confines of the vessel. "Furthermore, it happened very recently." He glanced at the newcomers. "Where's Krillin?" 

"Oh, he decided to stay behind and keep an eye on Spopovich and Yamu," replied Goku, her gaze flickering about the room as she spoke. 

"That's just as well," muttered Piccolo, and went back to sifting through the mess. 

For some moments the only sound in the ship was the buzzing of the lights as they lurched on and off. The smell of ki burns was still fresh to the noses of those sensitive enough to pick it up, and eventually they were able to distinguish the marks slashed across the walls. Some were holes left by chunks of craft material that had been ripped out, some were craters surrounded by dark halos—unmistakable indicators of ki attacks—and others were huge irregular dents. Farther into the area were the remains of a doorway, as well as the room beyond it. 

"This can't be the entire ship, can it?" Gohan wondered, returning from his investigation of the opposite side. 

"No," answered Kibito. "We are merely at the topmost level. If this ship is any similar to that of Bibidi's old one, the only passage from here into the inner sanctums is through a shaft opening in the middle of the floor." 

They all looked simultaneously downward. There, almost completely hidden underneath the rubble, was a spherical dais-like design set into the ground. In its midst was a circle with a telltale slit running across it: a firmly sealed horizontal access. 

"It sure doesn't look like we can get through that way," remarked Gohan. 

"The only way that thing opens is if Babidi grants us entry into the level below us," Shin informed them, a series of furrows marring his otherwise smooth countenance. "But since that's looking less and less likely, it seems we're stuck out here for the time being." 

"Says you," Vegeta announced shortly. He extended a palm toward the circle. "All of you stand aside—I'm going to _make _us a doorway." 

"Vegeta, you can't!" Shin interjected. "Babidi might not be here, but we still don't know if Majin Buu's somewhere inside his ship or not! If he is, the smallest shock is liable to set him free, and trust me, that is a risk we cannot afford to take!" 

"Why not? What other option _is _there? I did not forfeit that tournament and my match with Kakarrot so that I could sit around twiddling my thumbs waiting for your damned Buu to show up!" 

"Buu showing up is exactly what we don't want happening," boomed Kibito. "Babidi by himself is enough of a threat even without his minions! I still cannot comprehend why you continue to take him so lightly—" 

Goku had tuned out the proceeding argument; her attention was currently preoccupied by the traces of ki residue that clung to the rubble. They only barely registered within her built-in radar, but their lingering presence nagged at her senses as though challenging her to identify their source. And there _was_ something familiar about them, she realized; she was almost certain that she'd felt that ki before, had come up against it, had been struck by it. She breathed in deeply and crinkled her nose. And that scent—it was almost like— 

_"Goku!"_

Her eyes snapped open. "King Kai?" 

The squabbling ceased at her abrupt exclamation as her companions swiveled around to stare at her. 

"What are you babbling about this time, Kakarrot?" Vegeta barked. 

"It's King Kai," Goku announced, vacillating between her exploration of the fast-fading ki-signature and King Kai's sudden intervention. "He just contacted me." 

Piccolo grimaced. "King Kai? You mean that fat little cockroach on that tiny planet I got stuck on the first time I died?" 

The disembodied voice sputtered indignantly, and this time it was audible to all those gathered. _"Well, I never! So that's how you repay me for taking you in and feeding you and training you, eh? Why, you ungrateful green—"_

"King Kai," Goku interrupted him politely, "is there something wrong?" 

_"Huh? What? Oh, right. Goku, you wouldn't believe what's been happening here lately. I would've contacted you earlier, but I didn't want to bother you when you should be spending your twenty-four hours on Earth with your family and friends..."_

Goku glanced around at her assembled friends and family, and smiled. "I appreciate that, King Kai, but what could be important enough for you to try and talk to me now?" 

_"It's terrible—just terrible! Hell's in chaos—well, in more chaos than usual. King Yema's been trying to hold down the fort for the past half-hour, but even he's having trouble—"_

Goku tried to push away that encroaching feeling of foreboding. "Why, King Kai? What's going on in Hell? Are Cell and Frieza trying to take over again?" 

Her query evoked a host of stunned reactions from certain members of the assemblage. 

"Frieza?" Vegeta echoed angrily. 

"Cell?" uttered Gohan. 

Shin and Kibito whipped their heads back and forth between them, uncertain as to the nature of the current exchange but unwilling to interrupt it. Piccolo stood back and listened, his pokerfaced demeanor a façade for his escalating unease. King Kai had not sprung one of his tired jokes on them, a fact that underscored just how rattled the old man was. 

_"Oh, I wish it were that simple," _King Kai lamented. _"There's more to his whole business than meets the eye—of that we're all sure. We sent Pikkon, but..." _The sentence trailed off ominously. 

"What?" Goku's sense of foreboding returned with a vengeance. "What happened to Pikkon?" 

"Who the hell is Pikkon?" snarled Vegeta, not at all appreciating the other Saiyan ignoring his questions. 

She opened her mouth to answer, but once again, King Kai beat her to the punch. 

_"Goku, I hate to impose upon you like this, especially since this's supposed to be your special day, but I'm going to have to ask you to come back here."_

"King Kai..." 

_"Trust me, Goku, I think you ought to come. There's something here that I think might concern you especially."_

"I...I understand, King Kai. I'll be there." She turned back to the others, her expression both rueful and resolute, and lifted two fingers to her forehead. "Sorry, guys. I'll be back soon as I can. You take care, okay?" 

But Vegeta would have none of this. "Oh, no you don't, Kakarrot—!" 

His words fell on nonexistent ears as Goku winked out. Shin and Kibito gaped at the spot she had vacated. 

"How did—" Kibito stammered. 

"It's a technique Goku picked up," Piccolo explained, his tone brisk. "Instant Transmission. He—" He cleared his throat. "—_she _is probably conferring with King Kai at this very moment." 

"King Kai..." Shin reflected out loud. "Sounds like one of the Four Kais. And since Earth's in the Northern Quadrant of the universe, that must've been none other than the North Kai." 

"The North Kai?" Kibito echoed. "Are you telling me that Goku has been summoned by the North Kai himself?" 

Piccolo nodded. "What of it?" 

"Nothing," answered Kibito. "It's just...well, the North Kai oversees the universe's entire Northern Quadrant, which encompasses thousands of galaxies. To have him be on first-name terms with a mortal is quite unusual." _Particularly one from Earth, _he added silently. The last one had been Olibu, a blue-eyed, golden-curled superhuman the likes of which had never walked the Earth before or since. 

Evidently, Earth—and its inhabitants—had changed significantly since then, Kibito realized, sweeping his gaze over the gathered Earthlings. Perhaps it was time he and Shin stopped being surprised at these mortals. 

"I wonder what King Kai needed my dad for," Gohan remarked, a touch of anxiousness in his tone. With all the rubble, there was not enough room to properly pace, so he settled for simply meandering around the environs of the ship. 

"He mentioned something about Hell," recalled Piccolo. 

"Something's wrong here," Shin said, his mouth set in a tight line. 

Vegeta eyed him sourly; he was still incensed by Kakarrot fleeing and consequently skipping out on their duel yet _again_. "Oh, really?" he drawled sarcastically. "You think?" 

"I meant...in the Otherworld. Heaven, Hell...something's interrupted the cycle. I don't know what, but I can feel it." 

"You think it's connected to this, don't you?" pressed Piccolo. "Babidi's absence, the destruction of his ship..." 

"Yes. The timing's too perfect." The Supreme Kai clenched his fist. "Damn it! When Kibito and I came here, we knew our mission was dangerous, but at least it was straightforward: stop Babidi from raising Buu. But now...all our plans are coming apart at the seams, and we still don't know _where _either of our targets are!" 

"Uh, guys?" Gohan called out. He had strolled all the way over to the other end of the room, and his toe had come into contact with something that didn't feel like part of the debris. "Guys, I think I stumbled onto something." 

His discovery turned out to be a swath of blue nearly buried under one of the piles of wreckage, scarcely visible under the fluctuating lights overhead. 

"What _is _that?" asked Kibito. 

Gohan stooped down and grabbed at the object, and did a double take as he realized that it was connected to something else. He gave a quick tug; something pried loose from the rubble and flopped down to the ground. 

It was a hand—a huge, red-skinned hand with fingernails that tapered into talons. 

"What the hell—?" Gohan released his grip. 

"No, wait..." Kibito reached over, seized the limp wrist, and yanked. Grout rose in the air as pieces and hunks of debris were dislodged from where they lay on top of the body. 

And it _was _a body: a massively built form dressed in an azure outfit—now in tatters—with what used to be a white cape flowing down the back. His jaundiced eyes were wide open, his goateed mouth hung open in a silent scream, and his long salmon-colored face was frozen into an almost comical expression of bewilderment. On his forehead was the familiar stylized 'M', and imprinted across the powerful muscles of his neck and throat were what appeared to be finger depressions. 

"I—I don't believe it," hissed Shin, sounding like he didn't know whether to be awed or horrified. "It's Dabura." 

"The king of the demons." Kibito's voice was equally disbelieving. 

Piccolo squinted down at the cadaver. Unlike Pui Pui outside, there were no ki burns; his entire body was a map of scratches and bruises. Dried blood caked the corners of his lips and leaked from the insides of his tapered ears. "You knew him?" 

"We knew _of _him. The strongest individual in the Demon World." Kibito was staring at the corpse like he was expecting it to jump to its feet and attack them. "At least, he _was_." 

"No wonder we couldn't sense anyone around!" Shin straightened up and turned to the others, the shifting lights throwing odd shadows across his creased forehead. "There's no one here left alive." 

Kibito met his gaze evenly, reading his mind. "We just stumbled into a massacre."

* * *

End of Chapter Two  


* * *

**Closing Notes:** Wow...I actually updated within a week of my previous chapter. That's...quite rare. Anyways, thanks to all who left reviews and sent e-mail! Have 'em keep comin', 'kay? =) I'll be sure to address some points you guys brought up in upcoming installments, like...why's everyone so interested on Vegeta's relationship with the now-female Kakarrot? I mean, isn't their rivalry complicated enough already? *lol* 

_**Next:** Goku gets some bad news from a variety of sources: first from King Kai regarding Hell and a certain nearly-extinct race, and then from Vegeta regarding the _nature_ of said nearly-extinct race..._


	4. Three: The Breach

**Mailing List:** http://www.geocities.com/echelon002/ 

* * *

The Kakarotte Factor  
by Echelon  


* * *

  


* * *

Chapter Three:  
The Breach  


* * *

Scarcely five seconds after ending his telepathic conversation with Son Goku, King Kai turned around—and smacked right into a tall orange-and-blue-clothed form. 

"Hello, Goku. How considerate of you to be so prompt," he cracked, his voice muffled under the folds of fabric. "We were going to..." His sentence went unfinished as something considerably heavy pressed down over his skull. "Er, Goku...could you remove whatever it is you've put on my head?" He reached up blindly and grabbed at the offending weight. "My goodness...have you been stuffing yourself silly back on Earth? You seem to be getting a little soft. Well, soft but firm. That's all right, I suppose. And nice and rounded and..." 

And then he jerked back his hands as though he'd been burned, his entire body wrenching backwards, and ended up falling on his butt. From this ignominious position, he was afforded his first good look of the new arrival. 

Glass rattled and heads turned all over the Grand Kai's palace as King Kai's high-pitched shriek resounded throughout that level of Heaven. 

* * *

They unearthed several more corpses buried under the rubble of the destroyed vessel, a few of which Shin and Kibito recognized. Not far from Dabura's carcass was a leathery, gargantuan limb, which Shin tagged as having once belonged to Yakkon—a rapacious creature Babidi had adopted as his sort-of killer pet. 

Yakkon was one of the less fortunate; all that remained of them were a number of dismembered body parts scattered here and there. The dead bodies encompassed a diverse range of species hailing from various sectors of the cosmos, of all them bearing the distinctive 'M' motif on their foreheads. 

Ominously enough, they found neither hide nor hair of either Babidi or Majin Buu, or even the ball the latter resided in. 

"This is not good," was Shin's laconic diagnosis as the group reassembled in the midst of the wreckage. 

"I'll say. Who could've killed all these people?" Gohan wondered out loud, his voice flooded with empathy. Even after years of being a front-row witness to diabolical acts perpetuated by individuals the likes of Cell and Frieza, the young demi-Saiyan still found it difficult not to be affected by them. 

"First Pui Pui, then Dabura, then Yakkon," Kibito murmured, sounding profoundly disturbed. "Babidi's recruits were the most formidable, most ruthless criminals from the four corners of the universe even before their powers were amplified under his spell. And yet, whoever did this disposed of them as though they were mere weaklings!" 

"They _were _weaklings." Vegeta's words reverberated throughout the room like the last trump of judgment. As Shin and Kibito gaped at him incredulously, he clarified: "That Pui Pui person outside that you both said was all but invincible couldn't even survive a low-level ki-blast. Then we find this so-called king of the Demon World killed by something as mediocre as a crushed windpipe. If these were the kind of employees Babidi recruited, then it should be a laugh when we do come across this Majin Buu." 

The Supreme Kai looked flummoxed at the Saiyan prince's audaciousness, but he recovered swiftly. "Majin Buu is not a joke! We are talking about a creature made of pure magic—he has no limits, no conscience, and all he knows is to destroy! I've heard that you Saiyans can't resist a good fight—the more impossible the challenge, the better—but even with your Super Saiyan upgrades, Buu is way out of your league!" 

"The Supreme Kai is right," Kibito put in harshly. "We can't risk taking on Buu. We already have our hands full dealing with the wizard." 

Vegeta was far from impressed. "Oh, really? Why don't we deal with Babidi, then? Oh, wait, that's right—we don't know where he is, because you're all too afraid to search the rest of this ship!" 

"I've told you already, Vegeta! We can't chance—" 

"Um, you said earlier about there being a connection between all this and whatever it was King Kai was talking about?" Gohan interrupted, hoping to sidetrack them from a rehash of their old disagreement. 

Fortunately, Shin welcomed the change of topic. "Yes, I believe there is. In fact, I'm beginning to be convinced that we won't find Babidi here in this ship." 

Kibito regarded him in surprise. "You...really think he's left?" 

"Why wouldn't he? We can't sense anyone inside here. It's obvious now that something unexpected came up and altered Babidi's plans—the same something that caused all this. As cold-blooded as that wizard is, this butchery cannot possibly be his handiwork. Besides, he would not allow his vessel to get caught in the crossfire." Shin pulled the pad of his thumb across his chin, contemplating. "It's as if something occurred to set all these things in motion. First there's Babidi's absence, then his ship's in shambles, his underlings have all been slaughtered, and something's going on in the Otherworld. If we could only figure out what could have been the catalyst for all this, then we could get a better picture of how Babidi's plans may have changed." 

"You forgot one occurrence," Piccolo spoke up crisply. At the others' puzzled looks, he added, "Before all this began, Goku was turned into a female. I know we discussed this earlier, but we never figured out who was behind it, did we?" 

"You think what happened to Goku really is somehow connected to all this?" queried Kibito. 

"I wasn't sure at the start," Piccolo admitted, "but after what's we've discovered since then, I'd say yes. Like you said before, it's a bit too coincidental. Which would make Babidi a likely suspect. That's not to say, though, that he's the only one." He sent Shin and Kibito a cynical grin. "You two would be surprised at the number of 'acquaintances' who'd be willing to have Son Goku at a disadvantage." 

Gohan nodded thoughtfully. "I see what you're saying, but...why turn Dad into a woman? I mean, why _that_? That's...kind of weird." 

"Or sheer genius," Vegeta mumbled to himself, his voice so low that the others scarcely heard him. 

But Piccolo did. "_What _did you say?" 

The Saiyan snapped his head toward him, onyx eyes flashing defiance. "I said nothing." 

"Don't lie to me!" Piccolo was suddenly in front of Vegeta, his seven-foot frame looming threateningly over the much shorter Saiyan. "I heard what you said. Sheer genius, is it?" 

Vegeta snarled and drew himself up to his full height; although it was not as impressive as the Namek's, the barely contained power radiating from his stocky form more than made up for what he lacked in stature. 

Sensing impending disaster, Gohan quickly maneuvered himself between the two. "Hey, you guys, come on. Let's not do this here, okay?" 

Piccolo didn't remove his eyes from the bristling Saiyan. "Go ahead, Vegeta. Why don't you tell them what you said?" 

Gohan cast a look at the older man. "What _did _you say, Vegeta?" 

Vegeta simply glowered back at him and gritted his teeth. 

"He's been holding back on us, Gohan," Piccolo answered for the reticent Saiyan. "He knows a lot more than he's been letting on about your father's condition." 

Shin manifested at Gohan's side, his expression suspicious. "Vegeta, is that true? Do you have something to do with Goku's transformation?" 

That jolted the prince out of his seething silence. "Of course not! If you think I had a hand in doing this to Kakarrot, you're insane! I have been waiting for years for a rematch with that clown, and you think I'm going to screw that up by making him a woman?" 

"Bluster all you want, Vegeta, but I'm warning you." Despite Gohan's attempt at playing a living barrier, Piccolo managed to take one more step toward the Saiyan prince. "When Goku gets back, you _will _tell him all that you know about his condition, and you are not going to leave out anything essential. Got it?" 

Vegeta's aura flared into visibility. "Do not presume to order me around, Namek, if you value your—" 

"Er, guys?" 

Krillin winced as five sets of eyes honed in on him—three of them openly curious, two of them downright hostile. The ship's lights seemed to be in their death throes, their illumination coming out in pitiful spasms, but that was of no matter: the glow of the battle auras being generated by Piccolo and Vegeta were more than enough for Krillin to take in the considerable destruction of the interior—as well as the showdown-in-the-making that was ensuing in the room's midst. 

"Uh...what're you doing?" Krillin queried warily. He did a second scan of the place. "And where's Goku?" 

"He left to talk to King Kai for a minute," Gohan informed him, not bothering to hide his relief at his old friend's timely interruption. 

Shin cut to the chase. "Krillin, what're you doing down here? What about Spopovich and Yamu?" 

The confusion on the former monk's countenance dissipated, and was replaced by absolute seriousness. "I think," he said slowly, "you all had better come up and see for yourselves." 

It was far too late to save Yamu and Spopovich by the time Krillin had led the others back up to the surface: the first thing that greeted the contingent's ears upon their exit of the spacecraft's entrance was the sound of tortured screaming. 

The two thugs were lying on the field, writhing in pain as their bodies stretched and swelled and warped; it was as if their flesh were clay being kneaded by invisible hands. Their eyes bulged grotesquely from their sockets, their mouths elongated into twisted, yawning maws, and massive convulsions wracked their muscles like grand mal seizures. 

Gohan stared at them in shock. "Krillin, what—" 

He abandoned the rest of his question when Yamu and Spopovich exploded. 

* * *

"Oh, dear...oh, my..." 

King Kai slouched down on a nearby bench in the Grand Kai's arena, his hand clutched to his heart and wheezing like he'd run a marathon. Goku didn't see what was he was so worked up about; _she'd_ been the one who'd been violated. 

Bubbles the monkey scurried in from one of the arena's entrances, bearing a glass of water in his pudgy fingers. King Kai gratefully accepted the glass, and gulped down half the liquid. The other half he up-ended over his head to cool his heated face. 

Goku observed him with some concern. "King Kai?" 

"Waahh! Ah, that's cold! Cold, cold..." King Kai's teeth chattered as he wiped the water from his eyes. He glared at Bubbles, who shrank back. "Bubbles, I said _cold _water, not freezing!" 

Goku tried again. "King Kai?" 

This time he did turn in her direction, and let loose an unidentifiable gargling, choking noise. "Oh. Kais preserve us...you're still here." 

"Yeah..." The Saiyan shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "I, uh...I went through a little change." 

"A _little _change?" King Kai made another odd little sound. "That's the biggest understatement I've heard so far in all my time in the Otherworld, and believe me, I've heard quite a few." He handed the glass back to Bubbles, took a step toward her—a tiny, very reluctant step, Goku thought—and adjusted his round glasses as he appraised her from head to toe, then back up again. "Oh. Oh, my. So when did...ah...when did _this _happen, Goku?" 

"Not long before you called me, King Kai." 

"I...see. But you sure didn't sound like a girl when you talked to me just ten minutes ago." 

Goku chuckled, bringing a hand to the back of her head. "Aw, that's probably 'cause I forgot I was a girl ten minutes ago. I thought I still had my old voice, so I probably sounded like my old self while I was talking to you." 

King Kai coughed. "Ah. Still haven't adjusted your mental voice...that might explain it, yes." He took another shuffling step toward her. "Look, Goku, about my...er, you know...of your...your—it was an accident, and I apologize." 

"That's all right. It was my fault. You didn't know." Her disposition grew solemn. "King Kai, about what you were saying earlier..." 

"Eh?" He stared blankly at her for a moment, then smacked his head. "Oh, right! Goku, there's been—" 

"For the love of Heaven, King Kai! What came up and bit you on the butt?" 

The two of them swiveled around at the familiar voice. Entering the stadium from the leftmost entrance was Baba, perched on top of her trusty floating crystal ball. 

"Geez, Baba," King Kai groused, "why don't you say that louder so that everyone else on the grounds can hear you?" 

"I thought I did. What's with all the screaming? As if things here weren't crazy enough..." The old woman broke off as her gaze riveted on Goku. "Are my cataracts deceiving me, or is that Goku's sister over there?" 

Goku heaved a sigh. "Baba, _I'm_ Goku," she explained for what seemed like the fiftieth time that day. "Someone changed me into a—" 

She was interrupted as a blue light zipped toward her, did a loose spiral around her torso, and finally came to a halt five inches in front of her nose. 

"Hah!" cried Gregory in his usual tinny, slightly manic voice. "Would you look at yourself! Personally, Goku, I think you ought to stick with this new look. Much easier on the eye, if I do say so myself!" 

Baba was shaking her head in disbelief. "I let you spend twenty four hours in the living world, and this is what happens. Although..." A reflective gleam crept into her beady eyes, and she began to circumnavigate around the Saiyan, studying her like a particularly bizarre specimen of womanhood. "Goku, you _do _know who's responsible for this, right?" 

"No, not really. It just...happened. At the World Martial Arts Tournament." 

"Is that so?" Baba lifted an eyebrow—or, at least, she would have, had she still possessed one. "How long ago was that?" 

Goku scratched at her temple with her index finger. "Um, let me see...this was about...about thirty, thirty-five minutes ago." 

Baba and King Kai swapped troubled glances at her answer. 

"That's just a little after it started," Baba murmured. 

"What?" the Saiyan asked, pelting the solemn assemblage with confused looks. "What started?" 

"There was a break," Baba said gravely, "in Hell." 

"A break? You mean a breakout?" 

"In a manner of speaking. But I am referring more to a rift between the dimensions. But what do I know? I'm just a visitor to the Otherworld, anyway. My knowledge on how things work here is limited." She jutted her thumb back at her squat, blue-skinned companion. "King Kai should be able to explain it to you better." 

"Oh. Yes, yes, of course." King Kai cleared his throat. "Goku, forty minutes ago, there was a breach in the Demon World. See, this Demon World is a dark mirror of the world we live in. It's located on a different plane of reality not far removed from Hell itself. Now, whoever caused this breach brought someone from the Demon World back with him—none other than the most powerful of its inhabitants, a demon named—" 

"Dabura," Goku supplied. 

"Yes. The demon king Dabu—" King Kai paused, astonishment dawning on his face. "How do you know Dabura?" 

"We...came across him, just before you contacted me." Goku leveled her gaze with his. "He's dead, King Kai." 

"_Dead_?" King Kai goggled. "How? Who...?" 

"Actually, we still haven't figured that out. We found his body inside Babidi's spaceship—" 

Her old mentor gawped at her, flabbergasted. "You know about _Babidi_, too? How did you—" 

"Oh, hush, never mind that now," interjected Baba. "I'm sure Goku'll tell us why she knows all this later. Now get on with it." 

"All right, all right! Push-ee." King Kai rolled his eyes behind his shades and refocused his attention on the Saiyan. "Anyways, Babidi—whom we're now certain was the one behind the breach—brought back Dabura to the Living World to act as his bodyguard. Now Babidi's access of the Demon World was so deviously executed that no one in the Upper Dimension took notice of it. The only reason we learned about it was because while this was happening, something else was going on in Hell. Some of the inhabitants there were acting up—you know, blowing stuff up, terrorizing their fellow occupants and overseers alike. It's not unusual per se; some of the residents can get a little rowdy, but the sheer destruction that was being caused threatened the very balance of Hell itself." 

Goku strode toward him, her lips drawn into a tight line. "Like the time Cell and Frieza tried to take control of Hell." 

"Yes...and no." King Kai looked uneasy. "At least those two had the courtesy to threaten the ogres in charge into transferring their authority to them. With this one, there was no such finesse; according to the ogres and King Yema, it was just as if an area of Hell just started exploding. They sent in a number of people to investigate, but they never came back. So we called in Pikkon." 

"And?" Goku's head lifted up at the mention of her old opponent, and she bent her body forward slightly. 

"And..." King Kai averted his eyes from hers and let them roam over the rest of the crowd. "He hasn't returned yet." 

"You mean, he's still down there somewhere in Hell?" 

"I'm afraid so," admitted King Kai. 

Goku ran a hand through her hair, her head whirling. Pikkon's strength was nothing to sneeze at; the top fighter of the West Quadrant had single-handedly defeated Cell and Frieza without even divesting himself of his weighted headgear and robes. If Pikkon was having trouble dealing with whatever was occurring in Hell, then it had to be something extraordinary indeed. 

"Maybe I should go down there," she announced. "I could search for Pikkon, see what's going on..." 

But the others were already shaking their heads. 

"It'd be pointless. Whatever's been going down there, it's been over for nearly half an hour," Gregory informed her. 

"King Yema has already dispatched a clean-up crew to the area. Don't worry about Pikkon," advised Baba. "He couldn't have been hurt all that bad. I mean, he _is _already dead, after all. Can't get any worse than that, right? The crew'll locate him soon enough." 

"The whole thing was over within a matter of minutes, really," King Kai confessed. He produced a rose-embroidered handkerchief from inside of his robes and started to mop his forehead. "But whatever it was, it must've attracted Babidi's attention, because not long after that, he opened a portal between Hell and the Living World." 

"Which means, basically," chirped in Gregory, "that whoever goes through that portal's got a one-way ticket to instant resurrection." 

Goku's eyes widened. "Babidi brought back someone from Hell?" 

"Without question." Baba's already wrinkled visage creased even further. "He could have even brought back more than one. But until King Yema and his crew have accounted for every single individual in Hell, we won't know for certain who or how many went through that portal." 

"We do have a rather worrisome theory," King Kai blurted out. "There were ogres who were there before the trouble started, and they—say, Goku, could you fix your shirt, please?" 

"Whuh—okay." Goku tugged her collar up over her shoulder where it had been slipping down. She couldn't believe that she had once needed a neckline _that _huge. 

Baba eyeballed King Kai suspiciously as he went on wiping his handkerchief over his face. "What's the matter with you, anyhow? You're acting all weird, and you haven't yet cracked one of your corny jokes!" 

"_My jokes are not corny_!" shrieked King Kai. He then composed himself and addressed the Saiyan. "You'll have to excuse me, Goku...it's...it's just that...up here, see, I'm not really used to standing so close to...to, well, a girl..." 

Baba pinned him with a withering glare. "Hey! And what am I, chopped liver?" 

King Kai matched her glare. "Well, you and the East Kai don't count!" 

"Why, I never...!" 

"Never what? Landed a date? Now _that _I can believe!" 

"You shut your mouth, you short, fat, female-fearing, never-had-a-girlfriend loser!" 

"Grr...I'll have you know, you crinkled old wart-covered prune, that—" 

Goku moved between the two bickering elders and shoved their faces apart. "Hey..._hey_! Would you guys cool it?" 

"Yeah!" Gregory piped in, buzzing frenetically around them. "We got more important things to worry about!" 

"For once, the cricket's right." 

They all turned around once more to view the second wave of arrivals: none other than the Grand Kai and the East Kai. 

"Ouch," remarked Gregory. "Cheap shot, East Kai." 

The East Kai huffed and patted her fake blond curls. "Well, that _is _true. You all shouldn't be diddling around when there's been a riot in Hell—especially when everyone says that that awful Babidi person's involved in it!" She shivered. "After all, his father's monster nearly obliterated all of the original Kais. If it's freed again, it could come after _us_!" 

"Now, relax, East Kai," drawled the Grand Kai. "As far as I know, Babidi hasn't freed Majin Buu yet. As soon as we hear from King Yema..." He trailed off as he spotted a new face. "Well, well...no one told me we'd be having such a fine-looking visitor stopping by today." 

King Kai, Baba, and Gregory dropped their jaws as the Grand Kai elbowed his way past them to snatch up Goku's wrist. 

"Uh, Grand Kai..." King Kai began. 

The Grand Kai ignored him and planted an unnecessarily loud kiss on the back of the stunned Goku's palm. "It's a pleasure to have you visit my humble abode." 

The East Kai examined her closely, fingering her glasses as she did so. "I say, my dear, are you new here in Heaven?" 

Goku yanked her wrist back in mild alarm, and Baba took up for King Kai. "Really, Grand Kai..." 

Her words went unnoticed as the Grand Kai continued to appraise Goku with obvious approval. He stopped as he caught sight of the young woman's wild shock of hair. "Hm...you'll pardon me, darlin', if I may be so bold as to say that that's the most atrocious hairstyle I've ever seen. Not at all appropriate-like for a bodacious babe such as yourself." 

Goku blew her bangs up and away from her eyes, an exasperated motion. "Grand Kai, it's me, Goku." 

The East Kai recoiled. "_Goku_? You mean that muscular young man who nearly won the Otherworld Tournament? Your prize pupil? That Goku?" 

King Kai nodded somberly. "Yes, _that _Goku." 

But the Grand Kai wasn't as easily dissuaded. "You're Goku? Oh, no, no, darlin', you must be mistaken. Goku is a boy." 

"Uh, Grand Kai?" King Kai tried again. "That _is _Goku. He got turned into a girl." 

The Grand Kai regarded the others incredulously, then mounted a second scrutiny of the now rather familiar-looking young woman. Goku had had crazy hair. So did she. And an orange-and-blue uniform. So did she... 

"Oh—uh, er, ahem...oh, so it is!" The Grand Kai backed up a safe distance and began to chortle madly. "Ha, ha...so it is! I must say, Goku, kudos on the sex change. A risk well taken! I must admit, you're looking much better as a female. Much, _much _better." 

The assemblage sweatdropped profusely. 

"Uh...thanks," Goku stammered. "I think." 

The East Kai snatched the North Kai's handkerchief right out of his hand—ignoring his indignant "hey!" with admirable aplomb—and proceeded to dab delicately at her own temples. "M-my word! How did this come about, Goku?" 

"She still doesn't know," Baba replied on Goku's behalf. "But we've got a hunch that Babidi's behind it." 

"Babidi?" The Grand Kai knitted his bushy brows together. "Why would Babidi target Goku specifically?" 

"We still don't know that, either," answered King Kai. 

"Well, if Babidi's the cause of this, then it can't be good," proclaimed the East Kai. She flounced over toward Goku, peered up at her critically, and sniffed. "Besides, she's got legs up to her neck. No real woman's got _those _proportions. This body's just begging to be fixed!" She shifted her gaze away from the wide-eyed Goku and let it land on Baba. "You! You're what those on Earth call a 'witch', correct?" 

Goku whirled toward the old woman, hope lighting up her face. "Oh, yeah, that's right...Baba, you know some magic. Can you change me back?" 

Baba nearly toppled off her crystal ball. "Change you—hey, I'm not a magic machine, you know! I can't just undo spells cast by other people! It's just not safe! I _could_ try, but don't blame me if you get turned into a hermaphrodite or something." 

The group paled collectively, Goku in particular. 

"Uh, never mind," she squeaked. "I pass." 

The Grand Kai watched her discreetly from behind his shades. "Don't know why you'd wanna change back anyway, seein' as you look so very..." 

"King Kai," Goku said hurriedly, "back when you contacted me, you said there was something you needed to tell me that concerned me especially. What was it?" 

"Guh?" King Kai seemed caught off-guard by her sudden query, but he quickly got with the program. "Oh, right. Right. Like I was saying earlier, there were some ogres who managed to escape the devastation while it was still going on, and they've all witnessed the same thing. They say that not far from Babidi's portal, they saw Cell, King Slug, Frieza, Cooler—a whole lot of people who, for whatever reason, owe their stay in Hell to you." 

"So anyone, or all of them, could've gone through it," Goku deduced, her tone bleak. 

"That's right. But that's not all of it." 

She exhaled sharply. There was _more_? 

"The ogres also said," King Kai continued slowly, "that the chaos in Hell was instigated by Saiyans." 

Goku stared at him, a shadow passing across her countenance. "Saiyans?" 

The East Kai was befuddled. "What's a Saiyan?" 

"I am," Goku said, and there was something else underneath the gentleness of her inflection. "Are you sure, King Kai?" 

King Kai hesitated, but he told her what she needed to hear. "When the planet Vegeta was annihilated, millions of Saiyans were sent to Hell. They nearly destroyed the place. Those ogres don't forget things like that. If they say it's a Saiyan, then it's a Saiyan." 

* * *

"I told you, no one was around when they started going into seizures like that," Krillin declared steadfastly. "I kept my eye on them the whole time. I didn't sense anyone else near. I don't know what triggered them." 

Shin got down one knee, scanning the spot where Yamu had blown up. It was of a darker hue than the surrounding soil, and was still smoldering weakly. "Babidi," he muttered. 

Gohan did his own cursory scan of the spot in question. "You think he did this?" 

"There's no mistake. This is his handiwork, all right." He straightened back up. "I told you that Babidi disintegrated his minions after they had outlived their usefulness. There's nothing left here of Spopovich and Yamu." 

Krillin twisted his mouth. "Yugh." 

Kibito regarded him, his expression austere. "If what you say is true about no one being around when this happened, then perhaps their deaths were triggered automatically." 

"Automatically?" echoed Gohan. "How?" 

"When Babidi puts a person under his spell," Kibito explained, "he infuses him with a certain amount of strength-amplifying magic. For the gophers—his weaker recruits, the ones whose services he requires only for a short while—he sometimes adds a countdown so that after a set amount of time, it detonates inside the body." 

"Boom," quipped Piccolo, but there was no mirth in his intonation. 

"Exactly." 

Shin shook his head in disgust. "Just like his father. No respect whatsoever for any sort of life." 

Just then Goku re-materialized a few feet away. 

"Dad!" Gohan was the first to greet her. The others were not far behind. "What happened? What did King Kai say?" 

"He said..." His 'father' lifted her head. There was nothing jocular in her manner. "Babidi broke into the Demon World to get Dabura. And then, he broke into Hell." 

After nearly half a minute without anything further from her, Krillin urged, "And?" 

"And...he took someone from there, too. Maybe some_ones_. More than likely it could be one or more of our old friends. Cell, Frieza, Cooler, King Slug..." Goku shrugged, a deceptively flippant movement. "Take your pick." 

Predictably enough, the names rendered certain members of the group thunderstruck. 

"Th-them?" chattered Krillin. "That's impossible!" 

Gohan was shaking his head vehemently. "I don't believe it. I mean, no way! We've defeated them before. They're done for! They're old news! Why would Babidi go after _them_?" 

"Defeated or not, they were far and away some of the strongest foes we've come across," reminded Piccolo. "If Babidi took control of someone like Cell, he would be much tougher to defeat than he was last time." 

"There's more." Goku pulled irritably at her sagging-yet-again neckline. "King Kai and the others think Babidi's the one who did this to me." 

Shin glanced at her, astounded. "Babidi was the one who turned you female? But for what reason?" 

"Why don't you ask Vegeta?" 

This abrupt question was sprung forth by the ever indomitable Piccolo. The others stared at him, then at the aforementioned Saiyan, who had been standing by himself at the other side of the field. 

Piccolo followed their gaze. "Well, Vegeta?" he goaded. "Don't you have something to tell Goku here?" 

Vegeta returned their stares, a muscle at the edge of his eye twitching dangerously. "I told you already, Namek, I have nothing to do with Kakarrot's condition!" 

"So you've said." Piccolo folded his arms over his chest. "And I think I might actually believe you. But I still think that you're holding something back." 

"Vegeta." Goku extricated herself from the group and marched over toward the older Saiyan. "If what Piccolo says's true, you have to tell me what you know." 

Vegeta observed her out of the corner of his peripheral vision, noting not for the first time how much unlike a Saiyan female she was: her eyes were too round and too huge, and—this he noticed with a surge of annoyance—filled with very un-Saiyan-like ingenuousness. 

Goku pushed on. "Look, Vegeta, I know you might still be kinda mad at me for skipping out on our match, but the sooner we can get this straightened out, the sooner we can fight—" 

Vegeta could not suppress the burst of acerbic laughter that tore from his throat. "Us, fight? No, Kakarrot, I am afraid you cannot fight me." 

She blinked. "What do you mean, Vegeta?" 

His arm lashed out, ready to grab at her shirtfront, but he changed his mind and seized her arm instead. "Isn't it obvious? Don't tell me that you still haven't felt the change in your power level, Kakarrot!" 

The confusion on her face instantly gave way to utter gravity; it still surprised Vegeta how effortlessly Kakarrot could do that. "I have. From the moment I fell on you back at the tournament. I just haven't given much thought to it after everything that's been going on." She raised her free hand and gazed at its palm as though it would somehow provide her with the needed answers. "I know there's been a shift in my power level, but I'm still not sure just how much it's changed." 

Vegeta stared down at the arm he clutched—now half the girth of the male Kakarrot's arm—then released it roughly. He could tell her what he knew, what he was sure had happened to her strength, but he was a man of action, not words. 

"Brace yourself, Kakarrot," he rasped. 

She started as she felt his power level rising rapidly. Loose shards of dry earth began to rise in the air, and around them, substantial dust clouds unfurled outward in unremitting waves. "Vegeta—" 

"I said, _brace yourself_!" 

And she did—but it was not enough to nullify the no-holds-barred ki-enhanced punch he drove into her solar plexus. 

It _hurt_—that single punch hurt as much as any of Pikkon's Thunder Flashes, or any one of Cell's blows, as much as everything else she had withstood post-planet Namek. The last blow she remembered being as painful was that single strike to the stomach Frieza had dealt her—back when she'd been a he, and he had been all but dead, and unaware still of the Super Saiyan ascension. 

She barely heard the cries of angry dismay from her companions across the clearing as she wrapped her arms tight around her belly, dropped to her knees, curled up into a fetal position, and coughed up blood. 

Well, she had wanted to know where she now stood in strength, and now she had her answer. 

Goku spat out the last of the blood in her mouth, then lifted her head up toward the other Saiyan. He had still not retracted his punching arm and was watching her with his usual hard expression, but behind that she could discern an odd hodgepodge of emotions. A bit of satisfaction, a little more shock, and, unexpectedly enough, disappointment. 

In spite of it all, Goku found herself curving her crimson-stained lips into a smile. "Well," she managed, pausing to hack out a few more coughs, "thanks for showing me, Vegeta." 

* * *

End of Chapter Three  


* * *

**Closing Notes:** Yeesh—that went on much longer than I thought. Oh, well. Thanks again to those who reviewed and sent e-mail. There were a few e-mail replies that I'd like to post up here, but I'd like to ask the e-mailers' permissions first. Anyways, onto my replies to some of the reviews: 

Loriko Neko & otakufan: Yes, unfortunately, Goku as a female is weaker. Why else would a foe have him turn into one? Not to conform to the usual stereotypes (I'm female, too, you know), but it's a safe assumption to make, especially in regards to the Saiyan race, who rank themselves according to their strength. Case in point: all of the pre-destruction-of-planet-Vegeta flashbacks are dominated by males. You never see Goku's or Vegeta's mothers (even shortly after the former is born!), though their fathers figure prominently. Whenever a scene is shown with a group of Saiyans in battle armor, there's usually only one female, if there is any at all. 

But then again, Goku as a damsel in distress? Pffft—this is _Goku _we're talking about. ;P And remember: he's never really conformed to preconceived Saiyan standards, has he? 

Kookie: The Dragonball doujinshi in question is _Watashi wa Cacarot_ (spelled just as it's printed), volume two. I've managed to read (okay, not really "read"; my Japanese isn't that good) that single volume, though I'm aware that the rest of the _Watashi wa Cacarot_ volumes revolve around a very obviously female Goku traipsing around Earth and the rest of the galaxy with her troupe of rather maniacal companions: Gohan, little Goten, Future and Present Trunks, Tien, Yamcha, Chaotzu, Piccolo, and Vegeta (you gotta read it to understand just how maniacal ^^;;). The art is pretty good, though the plot's confusing at times and the reason for the gender switch is never really explained, though it seems that she's naturally a girl. 

Still, my main visualization of Son Goku as a female is based on the fanart of a Japanese fan artist named Nosuke, whose work can be seen on the non-link-free (sorry!) DBZ fan site _VC Crash!_ Her webpage, _Space Cottage_, which was once accessible by the general public, is now available only if one e-mails her for a link—a precaution, I think, after some of her artwork had been bandied around the Net without her permission. It's not hard to see why: she can draw some of the most intricate costumes and backdrops ever seen for Dragonball fanart, and her renditions of a female Goku actually resemble the male version (an extraordinary thing, since some male-to-female interpretations by other DBZ fan artists—and I've seen a _lot_—hardly bear any resemblance to the original). I'll see if I can procure a link to a sample of her work. 

Okay, this has got to be the longest author's notes I've ever written, and I still haven't addressed how I intend to handle the relationships between the DBZ cast. That'll have to wait until next chapter, I suppose. ^^ 

_**Next:** Goku returns to the rest of her disbelieving family and friends, and Shin and Kibito race to learn more about Babidi's new plans for Hell and Earth. In the meantime, King Kai, Piccolo, and various concerned parties contemplate re-training the weakened Goku with Babidi, Buu, and one or more returning foes on the loose... _


	5. Four: And Then There Were Three

**Mailing List:** http://www.geocities.com/echelon002/   
  
_**Author's Notes**: Well, this took a while. You know that thing I said in the first chapter about snail pacing? This is it in action. Then again, I suppose that comes with the territory when one writes chapters around nine to fifteen pages long.   
  
Okay, I decided to stick the notes up here. If you wanna skip this, then just scroll down till you see the chapter title. Otherwise, this's where I start posting replies to some reviews I missed replying to the first time around:   
  
To all those reviewers asking about the questionable state of Goku's strength: You all now know the answer, unfortunately. ^^;;   
  
Kookie: I think about 90% of all existing DBZ doujinshi never gets featured online. The one I mentioned I borrowed from a friend who got it from a penpal in Japan. As for the promised sample of Nosuke's work, I managed to get my hands on one image that hadn't been sanctioned. The URL is at:   
  
http://www002.upp.so-net.ne.jp/vc-crash/vc/treasure/img/n_fft1.jpg   
  
Of course, she's got bigger and more colorful pieces of fan art, but ever since her website's become password-protected, there are precious few of her works that remain available to the public. Which is a shame, obviously; I can no longer find the URL for the Girl-Goku-with-an-unusually-relaxed-Vegeta-and-a-Piccolo-Snail (yes, you read right) pic she did.   
  
DBZSerenity: The reason the development of the relationships between certain characters seems slow is because I don't believe people change their perspectives of other people overnight. Even if this is a fanfic, I wanted the cast to react they way they might have had in the anime, or in the original manga. But don't worry: if it's changes in character dynamics that you're looking forward to, expect a lot of 'em—albeit gradually—in future chapters.   
  
Nene: Er...I think I rather suck at lemons. (insert groan here) Besides, who would be in it? :P Okay, just kidding. Nevertheless, some of the upcoming chapters may have some material that, I think, may warrant an R-rating. Hope that tides you over...for now. ;)   
  
Chuquita: Well, Son's not a human girl—just a Saiyan one. ^_^ I guess that bit about her not looking like the average Saiyan female was a bit misleading. I based the female Goku's description on the male Goku's looks: even with the patented spiky Saiyan hair and the cast-iron build, his features don't fit with the average Saiyan (even his father, who happens to be a veritable clone of him, has a slightly different eye shape). With that in mind, it's not hard to imagine that a female Goku should bear little resemblance to the archetypical Saiyan female.   
  
Okay, I better stop now. ^^ As always, thanks to everyone who reviewed. Keep 'em coming—I thrive on feedback. Did I mention I've gotten more than a few ideas from them?_   
  


* * *

The Kakarotte Factor  
by Echelon  


* * *

  


* * *

Chapter Four:  
And Then There Were Three  


* * *

"What the _hell_ did you do that for?" thundered Piccolo. He stood over Goku's curled-up form, his dark eyes snapping fire. Gohan and Krillin crouched anxiously on the opposite sides of the ailing Saiyan, attempting to help her up. Shin and Kibito lingered at the fringes of the group, still bemused by what they had just witnessed. 

Vegeta met the irate Namek's gaze, his visage set like cement. "I did exactly what Kakarrot asked for," he stated frostily. "She"—he grimaced at the new pronoun—"wanted to gauge her altered strength, and I obliged her." 

"By nearly punching a hole through her?" fumed Krillin. 

"Would you rather I explain it to her using charts and graphs and a pointer?" Vegeta shot back, totally unrepentant. 

Shin watched as the downed Goku dragged the back of her hand over the ruby blots at the corner of her mouth. Her wrists were tiny, her fingers slender and candle-like. For a moment the Supreme Kai was struck by how incredibly delicate she looked, not at all like someone who regularly participated in earth-shaking, bare-knuckle brawls. It seemed downright immoral that someone should cause her harm, much less deliberately drive a blow into her stomach. 

"Still," Krillin persisted hotly, "you shouldn't have caught her off-guard like that!" 

"No," Goku managed. She waved off Krillin's and Gohan's proffered arms and hauled herself to her feet. "Vegeta didn't catch me off-guard. He warned me." 

Gohan was not convinced. "But if that's true, Dad, then you should've been able to absorb that punch. He didn't even go Super-Saiyan!" 

To his and others' amazement, Goku let out a hearty chuckle. "That's all right, Gohan. You can stop pretending that you didn't notice the change in my power level." 

Her son stared at her, aghast. While it was true that he had picked up on the variation in his 'father's' ki, he had, perhaps too optimistically, attributed this to the gender switch. But with the truly staggering heights their power levels were reaching, it was no longer customary for the Saiyans to sustain levels that were two thousand and over—save for Vegeta, who maintained almost half his maximum level as if it were a badge of honor—when they weren't tussling with super-powered beings. Which basically meant that the only surefire way to measure their actual fighting strength was during mortal combat. 

"You could still be adjusting to the change," Piccolo was reassuring his 'father'. "That could be the reason why your energy level's fluctuated." 

"Fluctuated?" Vegeta snorted derisively. "That's a polite way of putting it. She would be fortunate to have a _fraction _of the strength she had as a male." 

The others regarded him in varying degrees of disbelief. Goku digested this newest revelation in silence, absently running a hand over the still sore spot on her stomach. 

"That's—that's impossible," Krillin gasped. "Goku's power level couldn't have possibly have slipped that much just because he's now a girl!" 

"Oh? And I suppose you know some other Saiyan female on which to base that little theory of yours on?" 

Krillin opened his mouth to retort, found that there was no legitimate comeback he could make, and shut it again with a snap. 

"I thought not." Vegeta turned toward the rest of the similarly speechless assemblage. "Now, if you're all finished with your hysterical babbling, let me tell you something about Saiyan females. Back when we Saiyans still had a planet, the females were outnumbered by the males six to one. Do you know why? Because we prized strength above all else, and there was no room for the weak. In our culture, strength is the yardstick upon which we measure every individual's usefulness. Saiyan females had less to offer to our society because they were much weaker than the males. And third-class females were the weakest of the weak." 

Goku continued to take this all in with unnerving calmness, which irked Vegeta somewhat. Here he was telling the fool that her awesome power had dwindled down to almost nothing, and she did not even seem to care. He wanted her to squirm; he wanted her to be upset; he wanted her to call him a liar in a fit of denial. But she did nothing of the sort. 

Then again, the younger Saiyan rarely reacted to things the way the Saiyan prince would have preferred—it was just another one of the many things about Kakarrot that adversely affected Vegeta's blood pressure. 

"Don't you _get_ it, Kakarrot? You are a third-class female! You are the weakest of the weak! If this was someone's idea of getting you at a disadvantage, then he could not have picked a better way." 

"Of _course_!" 

The outburst, courtesy of the Supreme Kai, caused five sets of heads to veer simultaneously in his direction. Seeing the questioning looks the others were peppering him with, Shin went on hastily, "Goku, what you said earlier...you said Babidi broke into Hell and opened a portal from there to the Living World, right?" 

Goku nodded. "That's right." 

"And you're sure someone passed through it, right? Maybe it was someone you knew, maybe one of those people you named earlier—Frieza, Cell?" 

"Well, they were seen close to where the portal was when it opened. There's a chance it could've been one of them, maybe more than one." 

"I think there's more than a chance, Goku." Shin leveled his grim gaze with hers. "Whoever it was that wizard brought back from there knows more about you than either Kibito or me. And what he knew about you, he told Babidi." 

"And whoever told Babidi about Goku also had considerable knowledge of Saiyan physiology," Piccolo realized. 

"Precisely. That is why Babidi turned you female. Because someone told him that doing that would keep you from getting in their way." Shin began to pace back and forth, the cogs in his brain working overtime. "This's all beginning to make more sense now! That's why Babidi isn't making all the predictable moves. He's recruited someone from Hell who's been acting as an adviser, giving him all the information he needs on everyone his new minion knew of on planet Earth who could pose a threat to Babidi's plans—namely you, Goku. Babidi hasn't been interrupted in his quest to resurrect Majin Buu—he's just altered them. He's been one step ahead of us all along." 

"But why this?" Kibito demanded, sweeping an arm toward the nearby spaceship and the numerous dead inside. "Why would Babidi allow his new recruit to dispose of the rest of his lackeys? Wouldn't he need them to collect energy for Majin Buu? And why did he not stay with his ship?" 

Shin stopped his pacing, frowning thoughtfully as he considered the abandoned craft. "On those matters, Kibito, I'm afraid I am still in the dark. But I refuse to let Babidi play us for fools any longer." He shifted his attention back to the others. "Well, my friends, it appears our task has gotten a bit more complicated. Kibito and I are going to have to do some investigating if we are to find out exactly what Babidi's new strategy will be. There can be nothing more gained if we continue to stay here and wait for him to come back to his craft for whatever reason." 

"But what if he does return to the ship?" asked Gohan. 

"I will request the Kai in charge of this quadrant to post a sentry for this area. If Babidi chooses to show his face anywhere near his ship, then we will be there to greet him." He faced Goku, his voice infused with earnest regret. "Goku...I am afraid that until we know for certain who did this to you, you are going to have to stay female." 

Goku acknowledged the fact of his statement with a nebulous gesture, while around her, her companions snuck each other portentous glances. Vegeta wore an expression of absolute chagrin. 

Shin motioned to his assistant. "Come, Kibito. We are going to pay the Otherworld a visit." He inclined his head toward his newfound allies. "As for all of you, I want to thank you for choosing to accompany Kibito and I to confront Babidi. We truly appreciate your help, and regret that we dragged you all out here for nothing." 

Goku graciously returned his subtle not-quite-bow. "Don't sweat it, Supreme Kai. We were glad to have helped as much as we could." 

"Speak for yourself," Vegeta muttered, but the others took their cue from Goku and pretended he hadn't spoken. 

"We had better be going. The sooner we solve this dilemma, the better." Shin took to the air, Kibito at his heels. "Until then, my friends, I ask that you be careful, and keep your eyes peeled for anything suspicious. Kibito and I shall be back as soon as we can." 

Those on the ground watched their shrinking forms until they were swallowed up by the humid cerulean of the early afternoon sky. 

It was Goku who finally broke the brooding stillness. "Well," she said, "that's it, I guess. All we can do for the time being is keep an eye out and wait." 

"Yeah." Krillin scuffed the toe of his shoe into the dirt, carefully avoiding the darkened smudge of ground where Yamu had succumbed to his internal time bomb. "You think we oughta go back to the tournament?" 

Vegeta scoffed sourly. "What for? I'm sure we've already been disqualified. Furthermore, it's probably over." 

Krillin shot him a half-lidded look. "Oh, gee. I was thinking that maybe we could go back 'cause—oh, I dunno—that's where our families're waiting for us?" 

Vegeta made an indistinct, noncommittal noise and turned away. 

"You heard the Supreme Kai." Piccolo conducted a brief, final scrutiny of Babidi's buried craft. His vaunted Namekian hearing had not picked up anything inside, even when he'd attuned them to the bowels of the ravaged vessel. If there was, it had to be someone completely devoid of any sort of life force. "There is nothing more we can do here." 

"Apparently." Vegeta floated off the ground, cursing copiously under his breath about third-class idiots, their inclination to worm out of long-overdue rematches, and his own accursed decision to allow said third-class idiot to worm himself—herself—out of said rematch. 

Goku levitated herself up and squinted. The sun was still high in the sky, a haughty white-golden nimbus segregating itself from the low-lying ribbons of wispy clouds. It might have been two or three in the afternoon, which meant that the tournament was almost certainly over. 

Gohan flew beside her. His thoughts had drifted toward Videl, which reminded him of Spopovich and his grisly demise, which then brought him back to the whole Babidi-and-Buu riddle. "You know, maybe we should've gone with them. With Shin and Kibito, I mean." 

"Hey, yeah." As eager as Krillin was to return to his wife's cool smile and his daughter's warm embrace, he felt distantly guilty, as though it had been his fault that Babidi been a no-show. "Seven heads're better than two, I always say." 

But Goku was shaking her head. "No...you wouldn't be able to go with them even if they wanted you to. They're going to the Otherworld. And the only way mortals get access to that dimension..." 

She left the sentence dangling. Gohan dutifully finished it for her within the safety of his mind. 

_...is when they die_. 

His head wrenched toward his 'father', but Krillin, Piccolo, and Vegeta beat him to it. Their gazes were locked on the space above Goku's scalp, where the halo that denoted her Otherwordly status had once hovered. 

If Goku was aware of their shock, she opted not to notice. Her mind was on other, more important things. 

"I wonder," she said plaintively, and she didn't know whether she was addressing herself or the others. "How am I gonna explain this to Chi-Chi?"

* * *

Chi-Chi bawled piteously when her husband returned to her a woman. 

Goku reached out toward her wife, a tentative attempt at a husbandly sort of comfort. "Aw, c'mon, Chi-Chi, don't be upset. It's just a temporary thing, I promise!" 

But Chi-Chi was inconsolable. "Ohhh...is there someone up there who enjoys littering the pathways of my life with these kinds of obstacles?" 

Gohan regarded his mother in abject sympathy. He was fairly sure that Dende didn't have a sadistic bone in his body, but he highly doubted that telling her that would be enough to stem her distress. 

"First my husband dies and I'm left to raise our two children, and then he comes back for just one day, and then he skips out on this tournament—which, by the way, was our only chance at living out the rest of our lives in relative comfort—to follow this Extreme Karl..." 

"Supreme _Kai_," Piccolo corrected, blanching at her slipshod mispronunciation of the name of one who was basically the overseer of the universe. 

His interjection went unnoticed. "...to chase down some alien magician, and then he comes back undead and a woman!" Chi-Chi froze, the ludicrousness of the situation hitting her with all the force of a kick administered by a pint-size Super Saiyan. "Ohhhh!" she wailed. "_I'm married to an undead woman_!" 

Several nosy passers-by swiveled their heads in their direction, drawn by the sound of scandal in the manner in which condors were drawn to the smell of carrion. Goku redoubled her efforts at soothing her wife. 

"No, no, not undead—alive. I don't have to go back after twenty-four hours. I—I can go home with you and Gohan and Goten. We can all be together again, Chi-Chi!" 

"R-really? You'll be with us, Goku?" Chi-Chi sniffled, her distraught state temporarily quelled by the unexpected revelation. Unfortunately for all, 'temporarily' was the key word: in her happiness, she grabbed Goku in a hug, which alerted her to the fact that her spouse's warm, solid pecs had been replaced with soft twin pressures that were larger than her own. The realization promptly triggered a fresh bout of tears. "But you're a _woman_!" 

Goku cast a helpless look toward the rest of the crew, the less combat-inclined of which were still grappling with the concept of an all-powerful diabolical wizard named Babidi, a faceless universe-threatening monster named Buu, and a young woman named Son Goku. 

Yamcha was the first of them to regain control of his oratory faculties. Alas, what came out from his mouth was neither useful nor original. "G-guh-guh-guh-Goku...you're—you're a girl." 

"I _think_ we've already established that," snarled Vegeta. It was preposterous how long these Earthlings took to wrap their minds around something as simple as Kakarrot changing sex. Surely _he_ hadn't been that pathetic. 

"But...but...Goku's a _girl_," insisted Yamcha. Somehow his entire vocabulary had dwindled down to five words. 

"A girl," Bulma echoed hollowly; even her substantial IQ didn't render her immune to the same vocabulary-seeping ailment that befell Yamcha. 

Roshi and Oolong remained mute; their vocabularies were, for the time being, nonexistent. Their naturally perverted brains, which had never once included Goku—nice, decent, decidedly _male _Goku—among their centerfold fantasies, were undergoing some heavy-duty re-wiring. 

Eighteen also said nothing, though her own thoughts ran more in the vein of: _I wonder if a gender change would've been able to put off Sixteen's tracking radar._

Little Goten stared up at the figure standing beside his mother. Less than an hour before, he and Trunks had been zooming in the direction of Babidi and the Buu monster, hoping to catch a glimpse of some real-life super-villains, but their grand adventure was brought to an end when they had run into their fathers. At least, that had been true in Trunks's case; Goten had spent the flight back being towed by a lady whom, just this morning, he had learned to call "Daddy." And therein lay his conundrum: the lady had assured him that she _was_ the same Daddy he had met earlier, and even though she smelled the same and kind of acted the same, she couldn't _really_ be Daddy because she looked and sounded more like Mommy or Gohan's funny girl friend Videl and what was he supposed to call Daddy now? 

Even the hard-to-impress Trunks was gaping unabashedly at Goten's alleged 'father', his first-place trophy and the envelope with his winner's check dangling loosely in his hands. 

"I have a daughter-in-law," the Ox King was murmuring to no one and everyone in particular. "Whaddaya know. A daughter and a daughter-in-law." 

Krillin decided that he had had enough of this unnatural behavior. "Aw, loosen up, you guys, it's just temporary," he piped up, his voice overly loud and cheery. "Shin and Kibito said they would find out first who did it, and then she'll get changed back. Right, Goku?" 

"That's right," Goku said with more certainty than she felt. "I'll just be like this for a couple of days, at the very least. And then, Dende willing, this'll all be resolved and everything'll be back to normal." 

Piccolo shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. That had to be the most understated and optimistic summation of the situation he had heard yet. "Goku, Babidi and his new recruit are on the loose somewhere on Earth. Even the Supreme Kai can't locate them. We don't know why they've been biding their time, or even where and when they're going to strike when they do. In any case, I don't think everything is going to go as simply as you make it sound." 

The aforementioned female met his gaze over her wife's head, and Piccolo remembered that, prone to understatement as Goku occasionally was, the Saiyan had yet to underestimate a crisis. "Of course it isn't," she said levelly. "But aside from what he might've done with me, Babidi and whoever he's with hasn't made any big moves so far. And until they do, all we can do is keep our guard up and wait." 

Piccolo was not about to let the subject drop, not by a long shot, but he changed his mind as Goku's wife let out another wracking sob. He stepped aside, allowing the Saiyan to lead her wife past him, and privately resolved to himself that this would not be the end of the discussion. 

Goku led Chi-Chi toward the group, who had watched the exchange unfold in staggered silence. It was Roshi who first spoke, his voice soaked with the sort of awe usually reserved for religious visions. 

"Wouldja look at that!" he crowed, his eyes latching onto a section of Goku's form he had never bothered to be interested in before. "I could eat a whole platter off that che—" 

The rest of his sentence was left mercifully unspoken as Chi-Chi roused herself out of her crying spell and dealt him a hard whack on the skull. 

"You _pervert_!" she shrieked. "Stop ogling my husband!" 

Bulma added her own two cents with a second just-as-painful whack for the venerable Turtle Hermit. "What she said! And with Goku, too, for shame!" And then, as an afterthought, she turned and bonked Oolong. 

The pig squeaked. "Ouch! What was _that _for?" 

"That's for thinking the same thing! And don't try to deny it—I can see the drool on your mouth!" 

Puar gasped, then bonked Oolong as well. It was different from Bulma's blow, because she was essentially his size. Furthermore she enjoyed it, and that made it all the more degrading. 

Nevertheless, Oolong frantically wiped away the saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth while Roshi nursed the two lumps on his head. Goku stared at her old mentor and old friend for a moment, looking deeply disturbed, then let her gaze wander over the others. The Ox King deigned to meet her eyes, and Yamcha gulped and shuffled backwards under the weight of her stare. 

Goku let out a heavy sigh and decided that perhaps they needed a bit more time to come to terms with her new appearance. "So..." She pulled up her yet-again sagging collar. "Everyone ready to go?" 

"Go where...?" Bulma shook her head to jump-start her cerebral functions. "Oh, right! Right. Home. I guess since the tournament's over and all..." She clapped her hands together suddenly, which served more to startle the others out of their collective daze than grab their attention. "O-_kay_! Everyone got their stuff together? Eighteen, Trunks, Goten—you have your prize money, right? What about your trophies—all right, I see them. Okay, then! Well...uh, right this way, everyone!" 

The tournament grounds were choked with thongs of spectators, attendees, vendors, and other individuals engrossed in various states of cleaning up and departure, but heads turned nonetheless as the contingent made their way through. It might have been that they had been identified as the ones who had displayed superhuman abilities prior to their forfeit of the tournament. It also might have been that the passers-by vaguely recognized them from the coverage of the Cell Games. Then again, the reason might simply be the fact that they made quite a unique-looking band of individuals. 

Goku was back in her usual spot at the center of the front ranks, escorting the faint-looking Chi-Chi by the arm and flanked on the other side by her two sons. Gohan was craning his neck over the mass of people, simultaneously keeping an eye out for his schoolmates and searching for Videl, and seemed faintly disappointed when he saw no sign of the latter. Bulma launched into overly animated chattering, Eighteen wore a look of sly self-satisfaction (which became more apparent when the group passed a ridiculously oversized poster of the still-reigning World Champion), Master Roshi mentally calculated his favorite pupil's new measurements, Puar and Oolong bickered over the principles of eyeing up friends, and Goten and Trunks debated with each other in furious whispers on what to call Goten's new mom-dad. Piccolo lagged behind them, fairly radiating exasperation. 

Of all those in the assemblage, it was only Krillin who bothered to notice. He passed Marron's hand over to his wife's and slowed his pace until he was walking next to the Namek. "What's on your mind, Piccolo?" he queried, speaking in an appropriately low volume. 

Piccolo barely spared the former monk a glance; his gaze was fixated on Goku. "I don't like this. He's too relaxed." 

"She," Krillin corrected him before he could stop himself, and he ducked his head under the Namek's scowl. He hurried on with: "I know it might look like she isn't treating the whole thing seriously, but I think Goku knows exactly how things stand. She just doesn't want her family to realize how bad they might really be, you know?" 

"I know that! That's always been Goku's way." Piccolo re-directed his scowl toward the aforementioned Saiyan, who was at present fending off a particularly pesky newspaper reporter. "Look at her! Her power level's nowhere near what it was before. If we were to be attacked at this very moment by Majin Buu or Babidi and whoever it was responsible for that massacre back at that ship, we are going to be at a considerable disadvantage." 

Krillin contemplated the idea of taking on an amped-up Cell, Frieza, Cooler, King Cold, King Slug, and Dende knew who else, with the unknown but undeniably potent factors of Babidi and Buu tossed into the mix, and shuddered. 

"So what d'you suggest we do?" he asked. 

"We re-train Goku." 

Krillin couldn't have been any more astounded had Piccolo announced that he and Dende were intending to elope. "Re-train...Goku?" 

"If that is what it takes, then yes," the Namek rumbled. "We are going to do whatever it takes to bring her power levels back to what they were this morning, or close to them." 

"Wait a minute! How weak do you think Goku is now, anyway?" 

"Weak enough to be unable to transform into a Super Saiyan." 

Krillin finally lost his futile struggle to keep his jaw hinged. "Wh-wha...are you _sure_?" 

Piccolo favored him with his trademark disdain-from-on-high glare. It was almost identical to the one Vegeta would bestow indiscriminately on all those around him, except Piccolo's version had a truly deity-like quality to it, hailing from a considerably loftier height as it was. "We'll know that for certain," he said, "when we ask her tomorrow." 

To this the former monk put up no more opposition. 

Vegeta almost turned on them to rebuke them for their absurdity, but he restrained himself; there was no need for those two to know that he had been eavesdropping. So he settled instead for tightening his grip on the drawstrings of the bag he'd slung over his shoulder. 

_Fools, _he thought, and felt equal levels of contempt and self-gratification. _Of course Kakarrot can no longer become Super Saiyan. In the entire history of the Saiyan race, no female has ever ascended. It's biologically impossible._

His gaze inevitably landed on the newly minted female at the head of the pack, and something plucked at his spine. It was foreign and unwelcome and utterly repugnant, sensations he had not felt since the days he had served under Frieza. 

In spite of himself, he wondered if that was an augury of things to come. 

Not far from him, the Ox King was still murmuring to himself. "A daughter-in-law. Whaddaya know."

* * *

"We finally found that Pikkon fella," Mez said, taking off his glasses. He exhaled into the lenses, fogging them up, and polished them carefully on his shirt. "Deep inside the center of where the pandemonium was taking place. He was beat up pretty bad. Looked like he'd been absolutely fried, too—guy's covered in burn marks." 

Shin scanned the ruined sector. This part of Hell had been reserved for the more infamous of its populace, the ones whose evil was so entwined with their souls that not even King Yema's cleansing machine could separate them. There were no rides, pink blood pools, or verdant scenery in this neighborhood, just a vast, gloomy, near-monochrome landscape that contained no indication of having a ground, ceiling, or even a horizon. Now even the featurelessness of the area had been disrupted; the place was littered with craters, dark telltale stains, and other testimonials of chaos stretching out as far as the eye could see. 

Kibito had already seen his fill of the place; he stared instead at the two ogres' uniforms: informative white T-shirts emblazoned with big block lettering that spelled out the word HELL. "Can we see him?" 

Goz hummed. "He's been out a while. Probably still is. Don't know why you'd want to see him." Mez dealt him a rebuking elbow to his side, and he added, "Your Supremeness." 

But Kibito was not about to take no for an answer. "Pikkon may very well be the only one can tell us beyond a shadow of a doubt what happened here. If we are to get to the bottom of this, we are going to need his report." 

Mez scratched pensively at the underside of his chin. "What about those others you sent from Heaven? The ones who came here to investigate before Pikkon?" 

"We've already consulted with them. None of them were able to give us a definitive description of what they saw upon their arrival; they weren't even able to get close to the source of the commotion." 

"Aw, well. That's too bad." Goz brightened. "Hey, you any good at running? Tell you what: I'll take you to this Pikkon fella if you beat me at running. I—_yow_!" He doubled over as Mez plucked his elbow out from where it had been wedged somewhere between his ribcage. 

"Bite your tongue, Goz! This's the Supreme Kai and his assistant you're talking to! Of _course _he'd beat you in running!" 

Shin had long abandoned any attempt at keeping track of the conversation; he was squinting into the gloom, which seemed to be rife with bobbing silhouettes—evacuees returning to their segment of Hell. 

Goz tracked the Supreme Kai's gaze and correctly interpreted what was on the latter's mind. "Uh, Supreme Kai? There're other witnesses you could speak to..." 

"What's wrong with asking them?" The silhouettes were closer now; Shin could see a line of eye whites about twenty meters or so away, all of them narrowed into unfriendly slivers. 

Mez swallowed nervously. "You don't wanna talk to them, Supreme Kai. They're nasty ones, they are. Refused to go through the cleaning machine. Tried to take over Hell the moment they all got here." 

Shin's ears perked up at that bit of information. "The Saiyans." 

The two ogres regarded him in surprise before they remembered just whom it was they were talking to. 

"Well, yeah," admitted Goz. "They ain't that strong—I mean, the only reason they still look like they got their bodies is 'cause they're too stubborn to accept that they ain't got any no more. Then again, that's mostly how it is in here, 'specially with the really troubled ones. But those Saiyans're vicious, no doubt there. There's nothing they love more than getting into brawls—don't matter if it's with the sector supervisors or with each other." 

"The last supervisor they got they turned into their plaything," Mez confided. "Made a sport out of pummeling him whenever he turned his back, demolished his office, rioted every other week, generally made his life into a living...well, you know. We haven't had anyone in charge around this place since." 

"That would be incorrect." 

The ogres fairly jumped at the new voice. Kibito inched unobtrusively closer to the Supreme Kai, who calmly watched as the speaker emerged from the umbra. 

It was then his turn to start: the face of the approaching figure, though wreathed in shadows, was one he had seen before—back in the Living World, not more than three hours before. Granted, this face had a more weathered attribute to it, as well as a thick mustache and beard, but it the same. The entrenched scowl, the dramatic widow's peak, and the hairstyle—a mass of spikes finger-licked into a single pointed apex (though there was an auburn tint mixed in with the black)—all belonged to the Saiyan he had met on Earth, the one the others had called Vegeta. 

Before Shin could utter a word, the man went on. "Regardless of what the ogres and the demons here tell you, we do acknowledge authority in here. Namely, mine." 

Kibito flickered his gaze guardedly over the Saiyan. He was garbed in traditional battle armor, complete with flaring shoulder pads and thick white gloves and boots. The only discrepancy was the near-floor length cape that cascaded from his back and the rounded badge-like object affixed to one side of his chest plate. "And who might you be?" 

"I am King Vegeta." The stranger swept his cape out behind him, causing it to flutter impressively in the otherwise windless locale. "I rule here." 

That seemed to serve as the go-signal for the shadows behind him to skulk out of the shade: the slew of eye whites suddenly grew faces and bodies. They were dressed in similar uniforms in assorted styles, though none had the king's cape and crest (for that was what the badge with the pattern was, Kibito deduced), and all possessed characteristics that belied their shared ethnicity: spiky hair painted in varying degrees and shades of black, naturally hostile pitchblende eyes, and superbly-toned physiques. Even the more corpulent ones had evident musculature underneath the fat. 

Goz and Mez shuffled their feet, trying their best not to appear ill at ease at the approaching horde. Shin and Kibito involuntarily stiffened their postures; this was not a group around whom one let one's guard down. 

"King Vegeta." Shin let his neck tilt back to meet the Saiyan leader's eyes. It was odd; he had thought the king would be significantly shorter somehow. "I've come here to ask a few questions." 

The Saiyan king crossed his arms and let his left eyebrow climb, thereby demolishing any lingering doubts Shin or Kibito might have had about him being related to the Vegeta they had met on Earth. "I was wondering when you people were going to start sniffing around here." 

"Yeah, what took you so long?" yelled one of the Saiyans. The voice seemed to have issued from the back, preventing Shin and Kibito from identifying whomever it was that was speaking. 

The man standing next to the king was a bald-headed monolith with limbs the size of tree trunks. A sneer curled his mustachioed upper lip. "Isn't it obvious? They were scared of us." 

At this, the line of narrowed eye whites sprouted a corresponding line of teeth bared in matching smirks, making for a rather unsettling scene in the weak light. A few of them chuckled contemptuously. 

Goz and Mez were vastly offended at the implication, but Shin remained unfazed. "I apologize then, for our delay," he said equably. "I presume that you already know what I'm about to ask you, then." 

"You want to know what happened here," the king intoned flatly. 

"Actually...yes. I've been told that your subjects had something to do with it." 

"I see. Well, as flattering as your insinuation is, I'm afraid, as usual, that the information those prejudiced overseers have given you is not entirely accurate. We were not the instigators. Rather, we were the targets." 

"Targets?" repeated Kibito. For the first time, he became aware that the disheveled conditions of the Saiyans could not all be completely attributed to the collapse of their surroundings. The majority of them were mottled with bruises, scratches, and wounds, some of them still seeping blood, and cracks and perforations riddled their uniforms. Even the king bore bloodstains on his right side, rendered almost invisible underneath his dark crimson cloak. 

Shin took this all in with utmost gravity. "Who were the people responsible for this, then, if not you?" Even as he asked it, his mind was already scrolling through the possibilities: Cell had been seen near the epicenter, as well as Frieza and King Slug, Cooler and King Cold...all of them hailing from the top stratums of Hell. They had to be, if they had come gunning for the Saiyans. 

King Vegeta grinned. There was blood flecking the molars at the corners of his mouth. "People? No, my friend, it is simpler than that." 

"Are you saying that this was caused by only one person?" boomed Kibito, unable to stifle the skepticism in his tone. 

The grin evaporated from the king's face, and his expression grew shuttered. "If you are looking for your troublemaker, then I must disappoint you. He was the first." 

"What are you talking about, the first—" 

Shin's question died on his lips as a faint humming reached his ears. He let his head snap instinctively toward the sound. 

It was coming from the massive form of the Saiyan standing beside the king. His entire body was bleeding light. 

The multitude stirred restlessly, giving him a wide berth. 

The Saiyan in question seemed to be genuinely nonplussed at what was happening to him. He stared down at his illuminated hands, his countenance almost stupidly disbelieving. 

The glow intensified, lending a bluish white shade to the colorlessness of their surroundings and temporarily blinding those nearest to it, until it engulfed the Saiyan completely. 

An eye-blink later, the light faded. There was no longer a body underneath it. 

Goz was the first to react once his panic finally overrode his stupefaction. "H-_hey_! How did he—where—wh-where'd he go?" 

Mez whirled on the stone-faced Saiyans, his fists clenched and rigid at his sides. "What'd you _do _with him?" 

King Vegeta surveyed him apathetically. "I did nothing," he answered. There was something almost like smugness interwoven between his words. "He is the third." 

"The third?" Goz was fairly pulling out what little hair he had left on his scalp. He, Mez, and the rest of Hell's overseers had barely dodged the bullet with the Babidi debacle earlier, and now this. "What is _that_ supposta mean? Listen, buddy, this is _Hell_ we are talking about. Ain't no one can just up and leave his sector!" 

"He didn't leave the sector," Shin said. 

His quiet statement easily pierced through the smattering of murmurs; it was certainly enough to snare the flustered ogres' attention. Even the Saiyans, who were struggling to hold on to their façade of general indifference regarding the current goings-on, turned their heads cautiously in his direction. 

"Whaddaya mean?" demanded Mez. He was more composed than his companion. Which really wasn't saying much. "Where _is_ he?" 

"I'm not sure," replied Shin; his mind was roiling with the implications of what had just occurred. "But I know one thing. You won't find him anywhere in Hell." He stole a glimpse up at his companion, and saw confirmation in Kibito's stolid features: he had felt the dimensional rift as well. 

"But that's impossible!" yelled Goz. He was fast crossing the line from moderately panicked to out-and-out hysterical. "No one can leave Hell! No _one_!" His wild eyes alighted on the Saiyan king, and he forgot to be intimidated. "Now look here, your _Majesty_—you better tell us where that guy went, or King Yema'll make the rest of your time here a living—well, worse than it already is! And we're talkin' eternity here, pal!" 

A vein twitched on the king's ample forehead, and for a single nerve-wracking moment Mez was afraid that his friend had gone too far. But it was gone before the ogre could point it out, and a sinister smile played tug-of-war with the mouth lying underneath the regal mustache and beard. 

"An eternity?" The king shook his head, the movement slow and profound. "On the contrary, my friend—I doubt that we will be here for much longer."

* * *

He was roused from his near-trance by something that might or might not have been a clap of thunder. 

But the dusky sky outside was clear and bereft of storm clouds. The moonlight pooled, unobstructed, across the canyon floor and made art out of myriad rock formations. The wind had ceased to blow, and even the crickets had given up on their threnody. Any promise of motion within a fifty-mile radius seemed to have been put on hold. 

"And then there were three," he muttered into the crisp night air. 

For some minutes he meditated on his next move. Could he risk a retrieval, or was it more prudent to stay where he was and wait? What if the poor fool stumbled into _them _before he could even comprehend what had happened to him? 

So absorbed was he in his ruminations that he almost imbedded the toe of his boot into the inert body sprawled on the ground. 

He glowered down at it as if holding it responsible for his dilemma. Which it was, in a way. 

"I will admit one thing," he informed the cadaver, his tone dripping with derision. "Your skills certainly outlast you." 

The corpse, of course, did not reply, and he realized with a snort that it was beginning to smell. He toyed briefly with the idea of planting his boot on the overgrown flea's ridged round head and crushing it into a pulp. The idea lost its allure as let his gaze wander across the rock grotto, alighting on the figure of his son. 

He trudged over to the other side and stood over the young man, grimly observing the shallow, regular breathing and the rare look of tranquility on the handsome features. 

"You are going to have to wake up soon," he told him. 

He gathered his robes to him and shuffled off. With his father's shadow in retreat, the moonlight spilled again over the young man's brow, illuminating the stylized 'M' that had been engraved across it. 

* * *

End of Chapter Four  


* * *

_**Next:** Goku resigns herself to having ovaries for the time being, Bulma and Chi-Chi offer their own unique brands of assistance, "Kakarotte" goes one-on-one with Vegeta, Piccolo and company plan the re-training, and the ghosts start emerging from the woodwork._


	6. Five: Playing Woman

**Mailing List:** http://www.geocities.com/echelon002/   
  
_**Author's Notes:** Er...I can't think of anything to announce right now (other than the fact that characters therein belong to the great and incomparable Akira Toriyama and Toei), so I'll just get to the reviews:   
  
Hyberbole: Thanks for your reviews! ^_^ Glad you decided to give the story a chance. Thanks for the link to B-chan's male/female Goku fanart—I haven't seen that one yet. To answer your queries, yes, the Supreme Kai recognizes the connection between King Vegeta and the Vegeta he met on Earth. The resemblance __is_ rather striking. =P   
  
Cathowl: Good to know you're enjoying the story! Yeah, somehow I think Master Roshi and Oolong wouldn't really care even if that was their old student or friend that they were ogling; for some reason, I just could see them reacting that way. X_X   
  
Chuquita: I just wanted to say thanks for submitting reviews for practically every chapter. Oh, and by the way, I checked out some of your stories (a rarity for me, since I get to spend only about five minutes a week on the Net), and I think they're just hysterical! I liked "I Do?" in particular; if you squint real hard at the anime and read into every potential double entendre (particularly during the Buu saga), you can almost see the beginnings of "Kakay"-like obsession on Vegeta's part. *lol* Keep it up!  
  
Otakufan: I'm glad that you've stuck with the story so far and posted reviews on a regular basis. Thanks for the encouragement!   
  
Christina G: Good eye—yup, it's Paragus and son. I loved writing their part, short as it was. Movie 8, where the two first show up, is one of my absolute favorite DBZ movies. Expect to see more of the Legendary and his dad...and a lot more "ghosts"...  
  
Lady BlackDragonFire: Thanks for your kind words! As for the Goku/Vegeta question, well, it's rather difficult to have Goku undergo an alteration as drastic as this and not have Vegeta get dragged into the madness, right? ^_^ Although I already have a vague idea of how the tale might end (even wrote some potential snippets for it), I like your idea of an alternate version/ending. Hmm... 

* * *

The Kakarotte Factor  
by Echelon  


* * *

  


* * *

Chapter Five:  
Playing Woman  


* * *

For the first time in years, Chi-Chi woke up that morning with a warm body beside her in bed. 

Her first reaction was alarm: _Oh, God! Someone snuck into bed with me while I was asleep!_

She was groping for something suitably bulky with which to clout the intruder behind her when she felt the familiar stiff spike of hair tickle her bare shoulder. 

Even through the cobwebs of sleep still clouding her mind, she felt a smile bloom on her early-morning-dry lips. Her throat closed with emotion; she had been a widow for far too long, going about her daily routine with all the passion of an automaton, then retiring at the end of the day to a cold bed. It might have been unbearable had it not been for Gohan and Goten, her dual pride and joy. There were those nights that stretched on like a ghostly epoch, nights when she was unsure whether she was awake or dreaming and when her sons were the only things that reminded her that she had once shared a life with the most wonderful man on Earth. 

While she had understood the rationale behind his decision to remain up in Heaven, there had been times—particularly those first terrible months following his death—when she had resented him for it. 

But all that didn't matter now; Goku was back now and he was with her, and that was all that mattered— 

Behind her, Goku sighed, rolled over, and spooned up intimately against her back. 

Chi-Chi's responding sigh of contentment died halfway out of her mouth. 

Her husband's sigh wasn't masculine. There were two alien weights pressing against her shoulder blades. The arms wrapped her waist were slim and unmistakably feminine. 

It was only then that the full events of the past twenty-four hours fast-forwarded through her brain like a patchy, drunkenly edited slide show. 

Goku cuddled closer, her cool lips brushing the back of Chi-Chi's neck. 

And with that, every last pretense at restfulness was effectively eradicated. 

* * *

_Why did they decide to hold the tournament on a Sunday, anyway?_

Gohan splashed cold water onto his face and regarded his splintered reflection in the cracked mirror (his fault—he had accidentally broken it when he'd closed his medicine cabinet door too hard; it had been during his birthday in the days of Cell, back when he had been a juvenile Super Saiyan teeming with awkward, terrifying power). He looked like any teenager hailing from a high school habitat, like any young man standing reluctantly on the cusp of adulthood, fresh-faced and gawkily earnest. Certainly not like one who could catch machine gun bullets and lift tour buses with one hand. 

Unfortunately, what with the happenings of the day before, people would know better. 

The groan that had been threatening to escape from his throat for the past few minutes finally did. He conducted the rest of his early morning routine in a daze; his brain was otherwise preoccupied with the task of fabricating an explanation for the denizens of Orange Star High School. 

_Maybe I could say that Saiyaman stole my identity and pretended to be me to protect his own identity and I was really back at home chained to my desk studying! They'd buy that, right? I bet Sharpener would buy that. Oh, wait—didn't I wave at them when they started cheering my name? Crap—I don't believe I _did _that! Gohan, you dummy! Scratch that one, then. Hey, maybe I could say that I was under hypnosis and someone blackmailed me into fighting in the tournament and..._

He ended the notion before it could be completed. That excuse had shades of Videl all over it. 

Which brought him back to the fact that he hadn't seen her or talked to her since he'd bid her goodbye to follow Kibito. It bugged at him more than it should have. 

_Aw, man...Videl...I wonder how she handled learning about my little secret. Well, she seemed pretty understanding when I last saw her, but...gah, I don't know! She's had more time to think it all over and now she's probably realized that I _am _some kinda freak. Maybe that's why I didn't see her around after the tournament—maybe she was hiding from me. Maybe she doesn't wanna talk to me anymore. Maybe she's afraid of me now and she doesn't want to see me ever again and—_

"Arrghhh!" He almost banged his head on the wall, but stopped himself when he remembered that the house's foundation was no match for his skull. 

_Okay, Gohan. Cool down. You're overreacting. Why're you overreacting? You know Videl better than that! What's the matter with you?_

Gohan shook his head vehemently, deciding to chalk up his uncharacteristic melodramatics to any one of the usual teenage maladies. He trudged over to his bureau and pulled out a comfortable short-sleeved black T-shirt. He had it pulled halfway down his torso when he yanked it off again and exchanged it for a long-sleeved crimson crewneck. It wouldn't do to make apparent his fighter's build—the last thing he needed was something to remind the scholastic population that he was different from the average sixteen-year-old boy. 

Once he finished dressing, he quickly ran his fingers through his hair—the one indispensable hair care technique adopted solely by teenage males—and exited his room with only the most perfunctory of glances at his bureau mirror. 

The kitchen was deserted, which was a bit unusual since his mother was almost always up before him, getting a head start on the day's chores. Nonetheless, the dining table fairly groaned with a robust number of bowls and plates of steaming-warm food. Two large pots simmered contentedly on the stove. 

_Whoa. Looks like Mom really went all out this morning. _Gohan hung his book bag behind his usual seat at the table, sat down, and began to dig in. With the advent of his academic schedule, he did not have to wait for the rest of the family to sit down to start in on his meals. Even as he wolfed down his breakfast, he mentally rehearsed his excuses. 

_It was all a trick. With...lights and stuff. Yeah. A PR thing. Got paid to pull it off. Oh, you don't believe me, huh? Well, okay. Um, the real deal is I...have a condition. It's really, really rare. It makes my eyes turn green and my hair golden and makes me start screaming every time it happens and I can't control it and it's not my fault, really, I swear—_

At the corner of his peripheral field of vision, he saw his father enter the kitchen, yawning widely and stretching. "Morning, Gohan." 

Gohan smiled into his bowl. It finally occurred to him why his mother had loaded up on the victuals. He put down his chopsticks and turned toward his father. "Morning, Da—_aaaaahhhh_!" 

It didn't take long before Chi-Chi came barreling in from the back yard door. "Gohan? What is it? What's wrong—" 

She broke off as she surveyed the room. Gohan was sitting at the table, his eyes squeezed tightly shut and the patch of skin between his eyes and nose stained an overly bright cherry red. To add to the peculiarity of it all, he had wedged his palm vertically next to his cheek and temple, forming an improvised blinder, and he was twisting his head as far away as he could from the kitchen entryway. 

Standing in the kitchen entryway was Goku, her arms frozen over her head in mid-stretch and an utterly mystified expression stamped on her face. She was decked out in her favorite boxers—a banana-yellow pair with blue piping—and a white undershirt that had been made with a considerably more masculine frame in mind. On her new female form the shirt had morphed from ordinary piece of house wear into something absolutely lurid: the collar and armhole bottoms ended past her chest, effectively showcasing a distressingly ample décolletage. Fortunately for all, however, the shirt's straps fell strategically over the middle of her assets, preventing what might have otherwise been full frontal exposure. 

Chi-Chi barely heard herself over all the internal screaming she was doing. "_Goku_! I thought I told you to put something decent on!" 

Goku let her arms drop, her fingers flying protectively to the neckline of her undershirt. If her bleariness had not been completely eliminated by Gohan's scream, it was most certainly gone now. "I...I thought I did..." 

"You _thought_?" Chi-Chi was feeling light-headed; she suspected that it was because the majority of her blood was relocating to the skin on her face. That morning she'd woken up in bed with her topless and extremely _female _spouse curled up against her back and nuzzling her neck. If that wasn't a wake-up call, she didn't know what was. "Well, I—I won't have you running around this house dressed in those—those indecent hussy-clothes!" 

"B-b-but Chi-Chi..." Goku stammered. "These're _my_ clothes..." 

"Not now they aren't!" fumed the Son matriarch. "You are going to go find yourself some decent clothing if you're going to sit down at our table for breakfast!" 

Goku hung her head contritely. "Okay, okay. I'll go put on something else." 

"As long as they're not from your closet. It's obvious that none of your clothes are going to fit you properly now. Maybe you could get something from Gohan's closet." 

Gohan glanced up incredulously at his mother—or, at least, that was what he would have done had the effect not been ruined by his closed eyes. "_What_? Why?" 

"Because your clothes're smaller than your father's," his mother informed him firmly. 

"No, they aren't! We're almost the same size now—I mean...before Dad...before he..." Gohan floundered; visualizing whether or not his father could fit into his clothes meant visualizing her in that overly loose undershirt, which made him want to wash his brain out with industrial-strength anti-bacterial soap. 

It was then that little Goten, displaying an extraordinary sense of timing, skidded in from the back yard, barefoot and still dressed in his teddy bear pajamas. "Mama, Mama! I heard Gohan yelling! What happened to Gohan? Oh, hi, Daddy! What're you doing standing there?" He stared up innocently at his Daddy-Mommy in the kitchen doorway, suddenly feeling an odd craving for his baby bottle. 

"Hey, little guy." Goku tugged up her shirtfront and affected a sheepish wave. 

Chi-Chi clamped a censoring hand over Goten's eyes and regarded her husband in exasperation. "Okay, fine. Gohan's probably right about his clothes anyway. You can go find something from my closet." 

"Your _closet_? But—but I don't wanna wear my wife's clothes!" 

"And why not? Are you implying that you don't like my clothes?" 

"No!" Goku blurted out, waving her hands in a placating manner. "No, no, that's not it! It's just that...well, they're _women's _clothes!" 

"Which is precisely why they'll fit you better! Now go on. Go, before you traumatize your children any further!" 

Goku fled obediently, and Chi-Chi released a sigh she didn't know she was holding. She released Goten back into the land of the seeing and turned toward her firstborn, who continued to sit rigidly at the table with his eyes welded shut. 

"Gohan," she said wryly, "it's okay. You can open your eyes now." 

"I don't think so," came the muffled reply. "I think I'm officially blind." 

"Why?" queried Goten as he clambered up onto the adjoining chair. "Mama, why's Gohan blind?" 

"He's not blind. He's just being overdramatic." Nevertheless, Chi-Chi surveyed her older boy, full of concern for his emotional and psychological well being. 

"...learned more than I ever did in Sex Ed," Gohan was mumbling to himself, stabbing blindly at the abandoned chow in his bowl. "Didn't think I was gonna see that much until my wedding night...not that I'm thinking about getting married, of course—well, not now, at least. Besides, what would Videl think if...wait a minute, why did I just think about Videl...?" 

Goten piped up gleefully, "What's Sex Ed?" 

Chi-Chi made a choking noise in the back of her throat and thumped her firstborn's shoulder. "Now you cut that out right now, mister. Your father's already left the room. It's safe to open your eyes, I promise. Now get a move on—you're going to be late for school if you don't hurry!" 

Gohan relinquished his chopsticks and fairly flew out of his seat, grabbing his book bag from the back of his chair. His mother was right, and besides, the longer he stayed here, the higher his risk of being treated to even more traumatizing sights—like, say, his father decked out in bra and panties... 

Maybe he could collect the dragonballs later and ask Shenron for a mind-wipe. 

"ThanksMombyeGotentellDadbyeformeandsorryforscreaminglikethatwellIgottagotoschoolnowbye!" 

And with that outstanding exhibition of respiratory control, Gohan bounded out of the back door with a speed he usually reserved for battles with grape-mint lizard tyrants and mottled bug-like androids. Everything in the kitchen that wasn't nailed down rattled from the whoosh of displaced air. 

Chi-Chi lifted a hand to her forehead. "It'll just be for a couple of days," she reminded herself feebly. "Just a couple more days. Goten, you take that thumb out of your mouth! I thought you stopped that habit already!" 

Goten withdrew his thumb with a loud, wet pop and looked up at his mother. "I want milk," he said, plaintively. 

* * *

An hour later, Goku still did not come down to breakfast. 

Goten had already finished his (and washed it down with about six glasses of milk, much to his mother's befuddlement), and was currently outside entertaining himself by scaling rocky peaks and chasing carnivorous dinosaurs and the like. 

On the table, Goku's own plate remained untouched. Slats of mellow sunlight striped the spotless ceramic, the tablecloth, and the still considerable amount of foodstuffs as the sun slowly began its westward journey across the sky. Chi-Chi finished stacking the pile of used dishes and placed them in the sink. 

"Chi-Chiii..." Goku whined from inside their bedroom. 

She turned on the faucet. "Don't worry, Goku, the boys saved you some breakfast. Come in here and eat." Her husband didn't answer right away, which she found somewhat disquieting. "Goku? Did you find something to wear?" 

It took another minute before Goku responded with a meek, "Um...no." 

"Oh, for..." Chi-Chi turned off the water, dried her hands on a dishtowel, and made her way to the master bedroom, untying her apron as she went. 

The room looked as though her entire wardrobe had exploded in the middle of it. Blouses, T-shirts, sleeveless tops, and every conceivable bit of women's apparel adorned the corners and edges of the bureau, the dresser, the bed, the bedside table, and every other piece of furniture in the room. The closet was open and her side gapingly empty. 

The infuriation that bubbled up inside her all but dispersed as she caught sight of her husband. Goku was sitting in the middle of the clothing-strewn bed, her arms tucked into the cradle of her crossed legs. She was wearing the yellow boxers, a forlorn expression, and nothing else. 

Chi-Chi made sure the door was thoroughly closed—just in case Goten chose to demonstrate again his impeccable sense of timing—and whirled toward her husband. Goku had come a long way from the shameless country bumpkin he had been as a boy, but now and then he would find ways to remind Chi-Chi that he was still a child of the wild—the man had thought nothing of stripping down to go fishing, or removing his clothes while still on his way to the bathroom. Somehow, her husband's occasional bouts of exhibitionism seemed much easier to overlook back when he had been male. 

"Goku, _what_ are you doing?" she cried. 

Goku looked up at her, her eyes huge and dark and mournful. "I can't fit your clothes." 

Chi-Chi nearly tripped on a bunched-up pair of Chinese trousers, which she yanked up irritably from the floor. "What do you _mean_, you can't fit my..." She stopped as she examined the trousers. Funny, they looked wider than they did back in the store. A distressing thought crossed her mind. "Ohhh, no! It's because...it's because my clothes are too big, isn't it? Because I'm fat now, is that it?" 

"No!" Goku exclaimed. "No, no, Chi-Chi, it's not that! Your pants fit okay, but your shirts and tops're too small. I can't even pull them all the way down my front!" 

Against her better instincts, Chi-Chi lowered her gaze to her spouse's upper body, and realized why. "Um...okay. What about the loose tops? Have you tried any of my larger size clothes?" 

"Yeah. I can pull them all the way down, but it feels like my front's being squeezed flat and every time I breathe I'm afraid I'm gonna rip something!" 

Chi-Chi perched on one corner of the bed and sorted through the piles, finally snatching up a voluminous gray-and-yellow pullover. "What about this? This looks loose enough." 

"Yeah, but..." Goku hesitated. "That one doesn't cover my stomach." 

"What? Of course it does! This isn't supposed to be a cut-off! I've worn this old thing a million times, and I've never had to worry about it riding up over my stomach." 

"Well, it will on me." 

"No, it won't." 

"It will." 

"Goku...!" 

Her husband took the article of clothing from her and wriggled into it. True to her word, the front of the pullover draped over her substantial front and ended a quarter-inch above her bellybutton. 

Chi-Chi sat back heavily on her haunches. "Okay, so it will." 

Goku shrugged off the pullover and handed it back to her wife, a light flush tingeing her cheeks. 

They sifted through the garments together, but even the baggiest of Chi-Chi's possessions closely adhered to her measurements, which were decidedly dissimilar from her spouse's. Finally they found an old plaid polo-style shirt that fit Goku as long as the top three buttons were left unfastened. Chi-Chi passed a critical eye over her husband and decided that she looked like a refugee from a special redneck edition of _Penthouse_. 

Goku studied her wife's countenance and saw the deep-set V-shape of her slender eyebrows. "No, huh?" 

"Nope." 

Goku held her breath and unbuttoned her shirt, adding it to the pile Chi-Chi had folded. Then she braced her hands on the mattress behind her and vaulted out of the bed. Her legs felt like pins and needles, and she proceeded to walk it off, folding her arms behind her head in a gesture reminiscent of her male counterpart. 

For a moment, Chi-Chi was struck by the bizarreness of the situation: her bedroom floor was carpeted to nearly calf level with her own discarded clothing, and padding around the room was a half-naked woman who just happened to be her gender-bent, newly resurrected husband. A gender-bent, newly resurrected husband who, she noted with an irrational stab of annoyance, had a pair of breasts that even the silicone advocates would have killed for. 

"Goku, we're going to have to get you a bra." 

Goku halted. "A bra? Aw, Chi-Chi, I don't need a bra," she replied, and bounced lightly on the balls of her feet, completely refuting her own argument. For someone whose sex had been switched just the day before, she seemed remarkably at ease with her new body. 

"Yes, you do. Don't argue with me about this, Goku. I know more about female bodies than you do." Chi-Chi lifted a pile of neatly re-folded clothes and placed them back in her dresser drawers. With that done, she re-checked her underwear drawer—the only one that had escaped unscathed from her husband's earlier clothes-seeking frenzy. "Well, I don't think I'd be able to lend you any of mine. Guess that means we're going to have to pay a visit to Capsule Corp., then." 

Goku looked incredulous. "Just to borrow a bra?" 

"Bras," corrected Chi-Chi. "Buh-ras. Plural. And anyway, I feel like some girl talk. Not with you, because, obviously, you're not really a girl, and because it'll be all about you, and...never mind. Now come on. If we hurry, we'll be able to arrive there in time to eat lunch out." 

Predictably enough, Goku perked up at the mention of vittles. "Okay!" she said happily. "Can I wear my own clothes?" 

"What, and have them fall right off you in front of everyone there? Nope, we are going to find you something that actually fits." 

"Where are we gonna find that?" 

Chi-Chi mulled this over with great solemnity. 

"Let's go raid Gohan's closet," she suggested. 

* * *

On the blackboard, the teacher's drawing of the infinity symbol was a pair of circles placed side-by-side with their sides touching. To anyone else it looked like the infinity symbol as rendered by an overly pedantic geometry enthusiast, but for some reason every time Gohan's eyes wandered over it, he could not stop blushing. 

"Go-haaan," Erasa said, in a singsong stage whisper. "What're you looking at?" 

"Gwuh...nothing. Nothing!" He was immensely relieved when his voice didn't crack, and he buried his heated face in his textbook. 

_The perfect weird ending to a perfectly weird day, _he thought wearily.__

In front of the class, the teacher was extrapolating, feverishly scribbling mathematical glyphs on the board, but Gohan was finding it hard to concentrate on what the man was saying when he felt like a bacteria sample under his classmates' collective microscope. Even now, the hairs prickling at the back of his neck informed him that he was still being watched. He tried to recall which explanation he had decided to give them, but the morning had gone by in a raucous blur. He vaguely remembered some of the academic staff interrogating him about the Cell Games, his companions at the tournament, and his body dimensions—all in that order. There had been females shooting him looks that were troublingly reminiscent of the ones prepubescent girls reserved for their favorite boy band member; the boys had alternately eyed him with distrust or fell over themselves trying to punch him on the arm or clap him on the back as forcefully as they could. He had also gained a persistent coterie of stalkers who followed him like a floating mass of babbling arms and legs. 

Gohan glanced dolefully at the empty seat beside him. So far, the only one he had counted on to be his island of constancy had not bothered to show up. 

Erasa had told him, between giggles, that Videl was more likely than not out on an early morning crime-cleaning spree. Sharpener had muttered something about the possibility of Videl hiding out from freaky-powered, fashion-deficient geeks who flew around spouting bad superhero lines. Gohan had been properly disheartened by the latter. 

He was frantically erasing the rows of infinity symbols he'd unconsciously scribbled all over the borders of his notebooks when the object of his ruminations swept into the room with all the vigor of a pleasantly anticipated tornado. 

"Morning, Mr. Tome! Sorry I'm late—had to fill out some paperwork after this one." 

"No problem, Videl—" 

Gohan leapt to his feet behind his desk; he couldn't have stopped himself if he'd tried. "Videl! You're here!" 

She looked at him. The entire class looked at him, but their faces swam together like a waterlogged pointillist painting. Standing out starkly from the indistinct splotches was Videl's face, luminous and miraculously in focus. 

"Well, of course I'm here, Gohan," she answered matter-of-factly, but the ends of her mouth quirked uncontrollably upwards. "I still have to go to school, you know." 

He bounded down the aisle and was in front of her a second later, nervous and babbly and utterly overjoyed. "I—I thought you were...I was afraid you...you're not avoiding me?" 

"Avoiding you?" She tilted her head, honestly perplexed by this. "Why would I do that?" 

"Well, I tried to find you before I left the tournament, but you weren't around, and I thought that maybe..." 

"I was hiding from the reporters. Actually, I tried to find you, too..." 

Their conversation was rapidly taking on an odd continuousness; no sooner would Gohan stammer out what he had to say would Videl then speak her side, giving the onlookers the illusion that they were constructing one very long multiple-compound sentence. 

"...you didn't want to see me or something, ever again, and I _was _kind of late coming back to the island and I really couldn't search around for you as much as I wanted..." Gohan blathered. 

"...but my dad was getting really ridiculous and there were all these reporters hounding me asking about my alleged affair with Saiyaman and of course that's absurd because that would mean that it would be between you and me, and..." 

"A-_hem_." 

Their environs suddenly lost its detached hazy quality, and the classroom came rushing back in a burst of primary colors and tittering noises. The duo blinked at each other, at the leering sea of faces, and then down at their mysteriously linked hands. As decreed by the laws of unresolved romantic tension, they untwined their fingers and pretended that they had not been given a second chance by the love of their lives. 

"If you two are quite finished with your version of _The Young and the Feckless_, perhaps we could go on with our regularly scheduled class," the teacher went on dryly. 

They murmured incomprehensible apologetic noises and scuttled back to their desks amidst the knowing smiles of their fellow students. Erasa waggled her eyebrows at Videl, and Gohan's Saiyan hearing picked up the gnashing of Sharpener's teeth. 

The teacher sniffed as only single middle-aged math teachers were wont to do when confronted with the blossoming romances of the young and good-looking, and turned back to the comfortable realm of hyperbolas and asymptotes. "Well, then. Can any of you tell me where you might be able to find a horizontal asymptote? Anyone? In a population growth graph. What about a vertical asymptote? Here's a hint: you can find it in Figure 8.5 on page 105 of your textbook. Anyone? Anybody? It's x=0..." 

Gohan flipped frantically through his text to the appropriate page, but stopped as he saw Videl's coral-tinted fingernail tapping at the upper left corner of his desk. He lifted his head and found himself staring into a pair of warm cobalt eyes. 

For some reason—maybe it was panic—he blurted out, "I beat up Spopovich for you." 

Videl's response was a smile like the sun, and Gohan promptly forgot about prying classmates, abrasive math teachers, and lewd arithmetical symbols. 

* * *

Even at twelve years of age, Son Gohan had been so well built that Bulma had thought it humorous to present him with a scarlet shirt that had the words "CAN I GET SOME BEEF?" splashed over its front in ostentatiously chunky caps-locked letters. Though Gohan had been too shy to wear it in public, he'd become rather fond of it as a house shirt. Over the years, and after countless washings, the top and bottom lines had faded, and now the curved front of Goku's chest proclaimed suggestively, "GET SOME." 

Bulma couldn't tear her eyes off it. 

"It was the best fitting one we could find," Chi-Chi snapped defensively, catching sight of the expression on the other woman's countenance. "Everything else was either too tight, too loose, or absolutely inappropriate." 

"Uh...sure, Chi-Chi." Bulma shook her head and took a hasty sip of her iced tea, her gaze straying back toward the living room. Goku was talking to Goten and Trunks, crouched down so that she was at their eye level. Topping off her ensemble was a pair of worn canary-colored women's sweatpants and soft white canvas sneakers. "All of this must be really strange for you. I mean, _I _still can't believe that that's Goku in there." 

"Oh, it's him, all right—her—whatever." Chi-Chi took a steadying swallow from her own glass of tea. "She sleeps, walks, talks, and eats like my Goku. And she's been so good with Goten. He's gotten really attached to her, though of course he's kind of confused about the whole 'Daddy-is-a-woman' thing." 

"What about Gohan? Is he taking this well?" 

Chi-Chi colored as the memory of the morning came stampeding through her mind like a bull in a china shop. "Er, yes. He's been...very understanding. He knows his father didn't mean to—Bulma," she said suddenly, a beseeching glint in her eye, "is there anything you can do to fix her?" 

Bulma coughed into her tea. " 'Fix' her?" 

"I mean, bring her back to the way she was—him back to the way he was. Back to being, you know, _male_?" 

Just then Dr. Briefs stepped into the kitchen from the opposite hallway, managing to catch the tail end of their conversation. "Whoops. I distinctly heard the word 'male' being bandied about, which probably means that this is girl talk of the highest order, which probably means I have to vamoose." He did a quick 180-degree spin. "Well, good to see you again, Chi-Chi—" 

"Wait!" Chi-Chi sprung up from her chair and snatched at the sleeve of the inventor's lab coat. "I was just asking Bulma about...Dr. Briefs, you're a genius, right?" 

"W-ell..." He assumed a modest pose. "I admit there _have _been more than a few acquaintances who have referred to me as such—" 

"Wonderful. Now tell me this. Is there any way you can make a machine or something that can change a person's gender?" 

Dr. Briefs paused, considered her from head to toe, and said very delicately, "Now, now, Chi-Chi, you're still a fine-looking woman. There are less drastic ways to—" 

"Not for me, you genius idiot!" yelped Chi-Chi. "It's for Goku!" 

"Goku?" A trickle of sweat wound its way down the poor man's temple. "Does he want to be female, now?" 

"He _is_ already female!" Chi-Chi raged, waving her arms empathically over her head and stomping about the kitchen. "Unmistakably female! Disturbingly female! A stupendously anatomically correct female! A female with—" 

"I think my dad gets the point, Chi-Chi," said Bulma between sips of her tea. 

"—all the proper body parts!" Chi-Chi ranted on. "In fact, all her body parts're better than mine or even Bulma's!" 

"Chi-Chi, that's—hey!" the blue-haired woman objected huffily. 

Mr. Briefs' eyes were beginning to resemble little whirlpools. 

Chi-Chi finally calmed down a bit. "Perhaps you'll better understand the magnitude of the situation once you see my husband," she intoned gravely, and called out toward the living room, "Goku! Could you come here a moment, please?" 

Goku walked in, moving with her usual easygoing young-boy's lope. "Yeah, Chi-Chi?" 

"Goku, I was just talking to Dr. Briefs here about the possibility of changing you back to normal," her wife said carefully. 

"Really?" Goku beamed at the esteemed founder of Capsule Corp. "You know a way, Dr. Briefs?" 

"My goodness..." Dr. Briefs scratched the back of his bowl cut and peered intently at the Son Goku look-a-like standing in his kitchen. The black cat dangling on his shoulder appeared duly curious, cocking its head to one side as though to take in the full abnormality of it. "This is quite unexpected indeed. Well, Goku, you do seem remarkably female." 

Bulma drained the last of her tea and wiped her hand across her mouth. "And now that you've come to that astute conclusion, Dad, what do you think about our chances of coming up with something to help Goku turn back?" 

"Hmm." Her father mused on this for some seconds, then did a secondary inspection of the Saiyan. "Ah, what did you say was responsible for this?" 

"The best guess we have is that it might be a spell cast by a magician called Babidi," Goku offered. 

"Magic, eh? That's not very encouraging." 

"What do you mean?" queried Chi-Chi with a smidgen of worry. 

"I'm saying that there's a marked difference, obviously, between science and magic. You might say that they're two opposing ends of a spectrum. You usually don't mix the two if you can help it. If Goku's condition was caused by magic or something similar thereof, then the safer option would be to use magic to undo it." 

"But there's got to be something you can do!" persisted Chi-Chi. 

Dr. Briefs finally wilted before her entreating stare. "Well...I suppose I could research the matter further. I could...I could run some tests first, see what I can do..." 

Chi-Chi brightened immeasurably. "That sounds great! Thanks, Dr. Briefs. If you could just give it a shot...that's all I ask." 

* * *

Once inside his laboratory, the scientist had Goku stick out her tongue and scraped off some cells, then set about subjecting the sample to a procession of tests. After twenty minutes of fiddling around with the controls of something that looked like a cross between a stereo system and a giant coffeemaker and listening to Dr. Briefs' semi-coherent, multi-syllabic mumbling, Goku was sufficiently bored, and excused herself. Dr. Briefs, completely immersed in his analysis of her DNA, let her go with an absentminded wave. 

As befitting one of the most successful companies on Earth, Capsule Corp.'s "work" area was a labyrinthine collection of anodyne corridors that contained only potted palms for location markers. It was only through years of familiarity with the place that Goku was able to navigate the maze of hallways with ease; she intended to head toward the kitchen where Chi-Chi and Bulma had opted to wait. 

Instead she somehow ended up staring at a reinforced steel-carbon alloy door with the words "Gravity Room" painted solemnly on its front. According to the conveniently located door panel, the gravity inside was normal, but the light that denoted the room's occupancy was on. 

Goku grinned to herself and went in. 

The interior was brightly lit and shiny-new—either Bulma or her father had recently fixed up the place or Vegeta had taken heed of Bulma's requirement to refrain from unleashing high-level energy blasts. Goku suspected that it was the former. 

_Speak of the devil, _Goku thought as she spotted the Saiyan prince. He was standing with his back to her, preoccupied with the room's center console. Although the gravity apparatus was off, it was evident that he had just been working out; his bared upper torso glistened like tanned silk under the room's lighting, and the waistband area of his royal blue spandex pants was darker than the rest, saturated with sweat. A small sepia towel hung around his neck. 

She inhaled deeply. Odd, she thought: the entire room was drenched with Vegeta. 

"Hey, Vegeta!" 

He actually recoiled, as violently as though she had pinched his behind. Ordinarily, the prince's reaction to any of the third-class Saiyan's cheerful greetings was a blend of indifference, aggravation, and surprise, as if he were perpetually taken aback at the latter's attempts to engage him in conversation. The look he gave her this time pretty much ran the usual gamut, but for some reason there was an additional nuance to it that eluded Goku at the moment. 

Before she could ponder on that any further, he said, sharply, "What are you doing here, Kakarrot?" 

"Me and Chi-Chi and Goten're here for a visit. See, Chi-Chi thought it'd be good for me to borrow a—" 

"That's not what I meant," Vegeta interrupted, balling a fist over one end of the towel. His eyes flickered toward the gaping door behind her, half-expecting the Namek and the rest of Kakarrot's idiot groupies to come rushing in. "What are you doing _here_, in my gravity room?" 

Goku tucked her arms behind her back, meeting his harsh gaze with her own innocuous one. "I was wandering around the place, then I saw this room and decided to check on how you were doing, that's all." 

"I...see," Vegeta answered tightly. He was strangely dismayed when the other Saiyan's friends did not show—it meant that there would be no one acting as a buffer between him and Kakarrot. Then he scowled at his own ludicrousness and snapped, "Well, now you know. Now get lost so I can get back to my training!" 

He didn't quite expect the other Saiyan to agree. 

"Sure, Vegeta," she replied nonchalantly. "Just thought I'd say hi. I guess I'll see you around, then." 

With that, she spun on her heel and made her way back toward the door, feeling the prince's eyes drill into her back like perforating lasers. The atmosphere of the room felt latent and invasive, and charged with something that Goku found vaguely suffocating. Idly she wondered if this was a side effect of her change, and if Dr. Briefs would have a cure for it. 

The door slid shut in her face, the clicking of the automatic locks exceedingly loud in the closed space of the room. 

"You know what, Kakarrot—I changed my mind." 

Goku turned around in time to see Vegeta languidly withdraw his hand from where he had laid it on top of the door control panel. He began to walk toward her in measured steps, his mouth set in a narrow, horizontal line. 

"I have a better idea," he said. 

"Yeah?" She dropped her gaze to the sweaty towel around his neck, and had a flash of herself grabbing both ends of the towel and pulling. She blinked the odd notion away. "What is it, Vegeta?" 

"I've been training nonstop for the past few months in preparation for when I would finally face you at the tournament, but since you blew that off to hobnob with those pointy-eared fools and waste your time poking around an empty ship, I think I'm entitled to a spar, at least." 

She touched the nape of her neck, summoning up a serene smile. "A spar? Naw, I wouldn't be any challenge for you like this, Vegeta." 

He regarded her then, taking in the comfortable blood-red shirt and its nonsensical slogan (get some _what_, exactly?), the willowy frame and the distinctive hair, the earnest-apprehensive demeanor and the familiar-alien features. He remembered a man with her face pummeling him above a canyon, reminding him what physical pain was; he remembered this Saiyan's doppelganger claiming a prince's birthright when he had achieved the level of Super Saiyan before him; he remembered the same Saiyan matching Perfect Cell blow for blow when he himself could barely get in a decent punch. Humiliation piled upon disgrace piled upon failure—and it was all because of this female who now stood here in front of him telling him that she could not fight him. 

"I mean," Goku went on, oblivious, "I'm not exactly myself, you know?" 

The left corner of Vegeta's lips edged upward, and he reached out an arm past her, slapping at the secondary gravity controls on the plate next to the doorframe. He was immensely, terribly aware that it was just the two of them alone in the gravity room, and that she had no viable exit. 

"I know, Kakarotte." 

* * *

End of Chapter Five  


* * *

**Closing Notes: **Um...I had to cut it off there; this chapter was getting way too long, so expect to see Shin, Kibito, Piccolo, Krillin, and company—and yes, the "ghosts"—in the next installment instead.   
  
Before I forget: I've been thinking about setting up a webpage for this fic, complete with a title picture done by me (blech—I wish I could just beg Nosuke to do it ^^;;). The day might come when I won't have the time to go through the usual Fanfiction.net logging in and uploading processes with my dial-up connection...well, just thought I'd throw that one out. As usual, feedback is ambrosia to my muse, if you all have a critique or an idea or a question or whatever, feel free to send it in a review, okay?   
  
**Next:** Vegeta tests "Kakarotte's" limits, Bulma and Chi-Chi employ Goku as their new dress-up doll, Krillin and Piccolo talk, Shin and Kibito learn the effects of Babidi's tampering in Hell, and someone goes searching for his prince... 


	7. Six: Tilt

**Mailing List:** http://www.geocities.com/echelon002/   
  
_**Author's Notes:** Okay, my PC's CPU conked out last week and now the only things my monitor can display are squiggly Technicolor lines. So I had to rely on my (modem-deficient) laptop for the majority of this chapter and all of my website work. Does that sound like a veritable excuse? Thought so. ^_^  
  
Anyway, I'm starting a full-time job come November 1; I'm not sure how that'll affect the fic's progress, but I suspect that upcoming chapters might be significantly shorter. Also, I wanted to say thank so much for the reviews! I wish I could respond to every one, but I need to keep these notes short, so I'm just posting those containing questions or other things that I have to address.  
  
Kia: The opening line for your e-mail had me rolling in stitches! Thanks for allowing me to post it here, and I quote: "Yay, Goku's a girl and Vegeta's freaking out...now WHEN IN THE NAME OF PICCOLO'S PINK PECS DO WE GET SOME HOT MONKEY LOVE???" ^^;; Er, I've been asked that question before, but this's the first time it'd been worded in such an, um, interesting manner. *lol* Well, if it's, uh, Hot Monkey Love you want, then you're gonna have to wait for a while (of course, the Hot Monkey Love might not be between the parties in question—uh, no, wait! I'm kidding! Er...). What I'm trying to say is that one just doesn't just go from Point A—wanting to bash someone's head through concrete—to Point B—wanting to jump said someone's bones. The moving-between-points that tends to take a while, unfortunately, but it's just as fun—in my opinion, anyways. ^_^  
  
DarkSerapha: Thanks for expressing your views; as for the whole lemony question (I think I addressed something similar in a previous chapter), I've never written a straight-up lemon, but I do guarantee that there's going to be a decidedly limey scent lingering about in some parts much later into the story. I mentioned in an earlier chapter that the rating's probably gonna go up to R, and so far no one's complained. ;) In fact, there're some scenes in the upcoming installments that might warrant a bit more than that, but there's that whole Fanfiction.net NC-17 ban...anyways, I hope you stick around to see how the Kakarotte/Vegeta relationship evolves...  
  
Haley Yungst: Whoa, I almost forgot about the dragonballs—I knew I was overlooking something! ^^;; When I was brainstorming the story outline I had the dragonball solution thrown in somewhere, but I kept cutting sections out of chapters to keep them from getting too long until it slipped my mind completely (or maybe I intended for them to wait until Shin could find out the reason behind Goku's sex switch). Next chapter, though, the dragonball quest begins in earnest—thanks so much for reminding me!  
  
Hmm...two-thirds out of this chapter's review replies revolve around Kakarott/e and Vegeta. Should I be sensing a trend here...? ;) To all those asking for action of a different degree, you'll have to content yourselves for now with The Lick. ^_^_

* * *

The Kakarotte Factor  
by Echelon  


* * *

  


* * *

Chapter Six:  
Tilt  


* * *

Time was a commodity Hell both had a lot and nothing of, but at this point even the Supreme Kai, whose divine standing had granted him near-ignorance of the very concept, was beginning to feel its grind. 

He and Kibito had continued to grill the Saiyans long after the mysterious departure of one of their own, but they merely regaled him with a collective stare that Shin was learning to despise: it was a specialized blend of blankness, enmity, and ennui, perfectly modulated to give the object of their scrutiny an inferiority complex. Fortunately for Shin, being the sort-of ultimate deity of the universe exempted him from such things. 

Nevertheless, their inquiries were bringing up a whole lot of nothing. It was frustrating enough that the Saiyans were not cooperating, but the king, whom the Supreme Kai suspected knew more than any of his subjects, had become emphatically reticent after the departure of the other Saiyan. Coaxing more information out of him was like trying to wring blood out of a rock. 

Eventually even Shin's patience was taxed out, and he and Kibito turned their attentions to the rest of Hell's populace—specifically, the ones who had been spotted in the hub of where the chaos had begun. 

A bit further from the Saiyans' territory was a district of the Underworld that had suffered more devastation than the others. Where there had once been a tundra-like area with reddish sandstone formations clawing their way out from under ground that looked like hardened lava, there was now a flattened wasteland riddled with ki-wounds: craters, trenches, contusions in the form of blackened rings—the same disarray and detritus that had become familiar to the Supreme Kai and his assistant as their as-yet unknown quarry's calling card. 

Goz and Mez had long departed to report their preliminary findings to King Yema, which was just as well; the two ogres had been too overcome by their disbelief and hysteria to be of any real assistance. Kibito might have spared some sympathy for them had he not been preoccupied with being appalled with the insolent way the inhabitants of this doomed place conducted themselves before the Supreme Kai. 

Case in point: the android named Cell, who did not even believe there was such a thing as a Supreme Kai, or that Shin was a Supreme anything, and did not hesitate to tell the both of them so. Kibito had been sorely tempted to manhandle him for his audacity, but Shin was too interested in the android's account of the earlier attack on the Saiyans. 

"It was one of them, you know," drawled Cell. He was slumped against an alcove; he looked worse than the time he had been at the receiving end of Pikkon's Heaven-sanctioned brand of reprisal. 

"One of whom?" Kibito asked, curbing in his dislike of the man as best as he could. The higher the inhabitant was in Hell's food chain, the less tolerant Kibito became. And the android was situated somewhere comfortably close to the top. 

"The Saiyans, of course." There was synthetic purple blood trickling down from Cell's forehead, dripping inconveniently into his right eye, but it did not stop him from leveling a condescending stare at Kibito, who in turn derided himself for providing the android with such an easy shot. 

"Are you telling me that the one who attacked the Saiyans, the one who did this"—here the Supreme Kai indicated the surrounding devastation with a broad sweep of his arm—"was a Saiyan himself?" 

"I think that is what I am telling you, yes." Cell made a movement with his mouth that was almost an approximation of a smile. "I suppose the ogres told you that Frieza and I were behind this." 

"They might have mentioned something about seeing the two of you around here when it started," Shin acquiesced. 

"But of course," commented the android. Unlike the Saiyans and the rest of Hell's denizens, he did not seem to mind Shin's cross-examination; indeed, he was relaxed and loquacious, almost amiable. "You attempt to take over Hell just once, and those ogres hold it against you for all time." 

Kibito might have uttered a highly sardonic comeback had it not been for the disapproving shake of his master's head. 

"Funny creatures, those Saiyans," Cell was saying thoughtfully. One of the horn-like protrusions on his head been snapped off. It might have been incredibly crippling had the android not possessed the powers of regeneration. "They're fiercely defensive of their heritage, but once they're backed into a corner, they won't hesitate to turn on each other to save their own necks. When you look at it that way, they ought to have been the most successful species in the universe." 

"Of course they ought to be, what with their self-seeking barbarian ways," fumed Kibito, his voice heavy with sarcasm. 

"You _would _think that, being an infant to the true workings of the universe," Cell remarked mildly, channeling King Cold. He ignored Kibito's outraged sputtering and went on: "Now, this Saiyan...he wasn't really after the others—not at first. He was being very indiscriminate about what he was doing. Didn't give a damn who was in the area." He smirked. "Hence my present appearance." 

"You got caught," Shin realized suddenly. "In the destruction. There were witnesses who said...that you were close to where it started." 

"And so were Frieza, and King Cold, King Slug, the Ginyu Force...we were all too close, unfortunately. The Saiyan was out of control. I'm certain he would've blown this entire place into oblivion if it hadn't been for his father." 

Creases gathered in the space of skin between the Supreme Kai's eyebrows. "His father?" 

Cell sat up a little straighter. "If you're going to ask me for a name, don't waste your breath. I haven't a clue. Those Saiyans—they're all the same to me. With the exception of this Earth Saiyan I was created to kill, of course. But that's neither there nor here." 

Kibito made the connection and almost said the name. He got as far as shaping his mouth to sound the letter 'G' when Shin deterred him with a look. 

"Rather cunning bastard, the father," reflected Cell, oblivious to Kibito's near-gaffe. "Well, cunning for a Saiyan, anyway. He hated his race, you know, almost as much as Frieza. No doubt he told his son to go after them, their king in particular. I think he might've had a bit of a history with His Majesty there. Might've killed the king, too, if the magician hadn't shown up when he did. The two of them even had a little talk together." 

It was only at the mention of the word 'magician' that Shin forgot to be careful. "About what, exactly?" 

Even as the question left his mouth he knew he'd voiced it too urgently; something in the android's eyes changed, and his tone shifted from garrulous to guarded. "Why don't you ask the Saiyan responsible for this yourself?" he asked slyly. "If you really are this Supreme universal being or whatever you claim to be, you should be able to find him wherever he is, whether it be in Hell or the Living World or some other extra dimensional plane, is that correct?" 

"He _is_," Kibito snarled through gritted teeth. "But it is not as simple as you make it seem—" 

"I see." Cell now had that haughty expression allocated exclusively to Hell's elite. It was almost as annoying as the Saiyans' version. "Well, then, I think I had best leave you two to your continuing pursuit of the truth. And good luck locating that backstabber." 

"Why, you—" Kibito swallowed down his anger as Shin raised a dissuading arm and inspected the android's countenance, recognizing the now familiar signs of a terminated discussion. 

"Very well," the Supreme Kai intoned briskly. "And thank you for your information." _As insufficient as it was, _he almost added out loud. 

He left Cell to his alcove with Kibito following close behind him, but not after the latter had shot the android a final lingering glare. 

"Oh, and by the way," Cell called out casually after them, "if you ever run into Goku in Heaven or the Living World or anywhere else, do tell him that some of his old friends down here would like it very much if he came by for a visit, hmm?" 

* * *

The old gravity room on board Goku's Namek-bound spaceship had its only controls built into the center console, so it didn't occur to Goku right away that the panel Vegeta had activated held the secondary controls for the gravity apparatus. By the time she became aware of her oversight, she was feeling a definite downward pull, and could no longer raise her arm. 

"What's the matter, clown?" 

Vegeta pulled off the towel around his neck and began to orbit her paralyzed form, a triumphant hunter prowling about his expiring prey. Without breaking his stride, he ascended into his Super Saiyan state, momentarily infusing the room with its signature golden hue. He walked the same way he talked: casual and methodical, with an underlying portentous intent. 

"Can't move?" 

Goku gritted her teeth as her extremities slowly gained a couple more tons. Turning her head was no longer an option—she could barely even keep it above her shoulders—so she let her irises do the moving as she snuck a glimpse at the lime-green digital numbers on the door panel. 

240, and still climbing. 

"It's getting unbearable, isn't it?" 

She barely heard him; she was concentrating all her physical and mental faculties on trying to keep herself from becoming a smear on the gleaming gravity room floor. Her lungs burned as her chest refused to expand, her tendons ached with the effort of trying to stay upright, and she could practically hear the groan of her own bones slowly being bent. 

"You didn't...say anything about...using the gravity," she gasped out. Her jaw was getting harder and harder to manipulate; she wouldn't have been surprised if it suddenly detached from the rest of her mandible and clanked to the floor. "This...this isn't fair, Vegeta." 

Vegeta stopped his skulking. She could no longer track his position with her eyes, so she felt rather than saw him lean in closer to her to snarl into her ear. "You think _this _is unfair? Let me tell _you _what is unfair—having to watch you take everything that should have been mine! You took away my revenge against Frieza; you humiliated my royal ancestry when you became Super Saiyan before me; you command the deference of these miserable Earthlings with your lowborn ways when I, a prince, am left in the sidelines to be dragged along with everyone else to wherever you lead them!" His voice had grown progressively louder with each word, and now he was shouting. "Well, it ends _now_, Kakarotte! Now you will know how you should have been all along!" 

Goku watched her perspiration make dark spots on the floor as she struggled to hold her nerves and sinews steady. Her eyes flickered again toward the door panel: 387 times gravity. 

"Weak." 

419. 

"Helpless." 

In the back of her mind she was aware that this battle was one she could not possibly win on brawn alone; she felt like her muscles had been sucked out and replaced with iron fillings, and the floor was one enormous magnet. 

"Inferior." 

The gravity level hit 450. 

"Now, Kakarotte, you are just like any other third-class soldier." 

Goku closed her eyes and tried to ignore the fact that her ligaments, blood vessels, and various internal organs were on the verge of imploding. Her compressed brain—which she half-expected to start spilling out of her ears any second now—cast about for something, anything, with which to alleviate the direness of her situation. 

"What...did you...call me...?" 

"What are you—" Vegeta was caught off-guard by the abrupt tangent, but he got over it swiftly as he remembered with extreme irritation that the third-class Saiyan rarely conformed to any kind of projected script. "I didn't call you anything!" 

"...no. Called me...something different..." He had made a modification to her Saiyan name, of that she was certain. It had sounded like 'Kakarrot', but he'd pronounced it differently, as though he had tacked on a silent vowel at the end of the name. The last syllable, instead of a brusque "rot", came out sounding more like "wrote". 

But Vegeta was not about to be sidestepped again. "That'll be enough of that! I did not ask you to—" 

Just then the center console discharged a strident beeping noise, signaling that the maximum gravity setting had just been reached. A second later the florescent lights above were extinguished, leaving the low-watt bulbs to bathe the room in a spectrum of blood reds. 

It was more than a non-Super Saiyan could bear: Goku lurched downward, her left knee folding like a lawn chair. It was only through her innate fighter's reflexes that she managed to wedge her rigid arm between her torso and the ground, thus preventing a full-scale up-close-and-personal encounter with the floor. Even as she tried to stabilize herself in her new position, she knew that getting back upright was no longer possible. 

Vegeta looked down at her, appraising her crouched form, and felt a sort of quicksilver thrill. His arm lashed out, his fingers burying themselves in her thick ebony mane. 

The sight of his hand on Kakarotte's drooping head was unexpectedly pleasing to the prince, and for a second he admired the juxtaposition of his strong knuckles next to her delicately bowed neck. Then he shoved his palm back, forcing the downtrodden Saiyan's gaze upwards. 

"Look at you," he jeered. "If only your friends could see you now! How does it feel, Kakarotte, to no longer be the strongest of us?" 

He wanted to see the fear and defenselessness he was certain was in her eyes, but once again, Kakarotte did not cooperate: her eyes were squeezed tightly closed. He could feel the flickering of her ki; though her power level was a ghost now of its former mind-boggling vitality, it was still stronger than he had expected. He had barely sensed her ki when she'd first walked in—which was probably why she'd been able to startle him—but it had grown significantly, no doubt to combat the room's escalating gravity. It was a useless exercise, of course; she was all but incapacitated now, slowly and inexorably being pushed to her knees. 

The thought stirred up something inside him: anticipation and exhilaration and more than a bit of madness. It was something he had not felt since that fateful day on Namek as he had stared up at the dragon Porunga and waited to cross the boundary into immortality. Back then eternal life had been his utmost ambition, though he saw it mostly as a means to an end in his insurrection against Frieza. The idea had long ceased to mean anything to him after the death of the tyrant—which, incongruously enough, had happened around the time his life's goal had shifted from killing Frieza to defeating a certain third-class Saiyan. 

It had taken him years, decades, but now that Saiyan hunched down before him, helpless, completely at bay, her deferential position proof of his sovereignty—which was exactly how it should have been so long ago. 

Granted, Kakarotte was a weak Saiyan female now, and her genuflection was mostly due to the excruciating gravity levels, but Vegeta loftily decided not to dwell on those piddling details. 

He let go of her hair and pressed the flat of his palm to the curve of her cranium, unwittingly heeding that malevolent little voice in the back of his brain that cackled how sweet it would be, oh so much sweeter, if Kakarotte would fully prostrate before him. 

As if on cue, she slumped down further, her right leg surrendering to the terrible crushing weight. She was down on both knees now, and Vegeta pulled his hand from her head before she could feel the trembling in his fingers. 

"Fall down, Kakarotte," he advised. "Fall down. It'll be much, much easier for you." He felt his cheek muscle throb with the onslaught of his protracted sneer. "Facedown on the floor before me like the lowborn you are." 

Kakarotte responded by flipping over. 

Vegeta gaped down at her upside-down face between the toes of his boots. She was now well and truly down, but not in the way he had wanted her: instead of her on her belly in front of him groveling for her health, she'd elected to lie on her back, neatly saving herself from an ignominious position and consequently depriving the prince of the gratification of seeing her prostrate before him. 

His ire flared briefly at the other Saiyan's feint—once, just once, couldn't Kakarotte ever do what was expected of her?—but it was extinguished as he realized that she was pinned to the floor under an invisible hundred-ton blanket, utterly immobilized. 

For some seconds the only sounds that carried in the static air of the gravity room were Kakarotte's labored breathing and the clicking of the soles of Vegeta's boots on the floor as he began to walk. 

"That was good, Kakarotte. Clever, almost." He leisurely circled her supine figure, the words flowing out of his mouth with barely restrained glee. "But now you seem to have placed yourself in another quandary. You can't seem to move. This room's practically soundproof. It's just you and I in here. Face it, Kakarotte: you are at my mercy." 

She didn't answer, which for some reason offended him deeply. Her head was also turned in the opposite direction, away from him, which irked him even more. He wanted her to react, wanted her to be exceedingly aware of him and his proximity, wanted her to _acknowledge_ him, damn it. 

Snarling, he maneuvered over her sprawled form and plunked himself down squarely on her stomach like a schoolyard bully, his legs propped on either side of her. 

This earned a protesting moan from Kakarotte, and he leaned further into her, determined to provoke more similar sounds. She was still facing away from him. He decided to rectify this particular detail by grabbing her chin with his left hand and wrenching her face up. Gallingly enough, her eyes were still shut tight. 

"_Look _at me, Kakarotte!" 

She did, and he was transfixed when he saw his own face, reflected in startling detail within the huge obsidian mirrors of her eyes. It took a moment for him to remember what he was going to say. 

"It hurts, doesn't it? The pressure on your body...it must be agonizing." 

Kakarotte opened her mouth, the movement barely perceptible, but Vegeta felt it in his fingers. His iron grip on her chin had compacted her lips into a puckered cupid's-bow, and he withdrew his hand, unconsciously sliding it down the slippery curve of her sweat-streaked throat. He had the sensation of a man standing on the edge of an ocean, caught in the grip of a powerful undertow, his equilibrium tilting treacherously. 

"Well? Aren't you going to do something about it?" 

Her brow dipped further. She looked incredibly out of context lying there underneath him, with her arms spread flat on the floor and elbows crooked in ninety-degree angles, her glossy-damp skin and her bangs sticking wetly to her forehead, her teeth clenched and the fine bones of her arched neck starkly apparent underneath the red, red light of the room. 

She did not look like any Kakarrot he had known. 

"Why don't you turn Super Saiyan?" he breathed, knowing very well that she could not. She was almost there now, almost at the verge of total capitulation; all he needed her to do now was to try and turn Super Saiyan, try until she was blue in the face. And he would be there to watch her pitiful, futile attempts from his front-row seat and bask in her failure. 

But Kakarotte wasn't even trying. She was being meticulously and deliberately crushed to death—and she wasn't even _trying_. Her power level was all but stagnant, refusing to ascend to heights she knew she could not reach. 

"Turn Super Saiyan." His fingers twitched around her neck, at his side, all primed and ready to take some kind of ad hoc action. 

Her head had all the mobility of an ocean liner, and her eyes cast about recklessly for something to latch onto. But Vegeta kept getting in the way—he was all hard planes and sharp angles, slick, bronzed skin and smoothly collaborating muscles, and she could not see anything else. 

He bellowed down at her, the tip of his nose banging into hers. "_Turn Super Saiyan, Kakarotte_!" 

_"Vegeta?"_

He stared down at her, almost mindlessly, until it finally pierced his brain that the intervening voice had issued from the gravity room's intercom. 

_"Vegeta, the gravity—it's all the way up...didn't Dad and I tell you not to do that? Just because there's a maximum level doesn't mean that you have to test it out, you know!"_

Vegeta felt the beginnings of a Richter-scale-worthy growl build up in his throat, and suppressed it with difficulty. "Go away, Woman." 

The Woman heard him; she had obviously installed the two-way the last time she had been tinkering with the room. _"Oh, pardon me, your Highness. Forgive my untimely interruption of your very important business, but Chi-Chi and I are looking for Goku and we can't seem to find her. Have you seen her?"_

He looked down at his living couch, noticed that Kakarotte's eyes were shut again, and grimaced through the testosterone haze in his head. "What makes you think I have any idea where that fool is?" 

She 'hmm'ed, the sound tinny in the closed circuit of the intercom.  _"I guess...it's not like you're done with your requisite eighteen hours of training, anyway..." _She trailed off, then said charily, _"Seriously, Vegeta...are you sure Goku's not in there? What _are _you doing?"_

"Nothing of importance. Now leave me be so I can get back to my...my training!" 

_"I don't believe you! Goku? Oh, crap, Goku, are you in there? Vegeta, you open this door right now—"_

"Woman, would you mind your own business—" 

Goku only registered their exchange as a series of mumbles that was no match for the ringing in her ears. Every muscle and nerve ending screamed at her as they neared the end of their tethers, and her lungs contracted laboriously, fighting to suck in air that could not be extracted with Vegeta's weight on her. She had to breathe, had to get him off of her somehow— 

She cracked open an eye, and in the center of her blurry vision was something round and dark. Belatedly she realized that somewhere in the middle of his conversation with Bulma through the intercom, Vegeta had shifted forward, his body tilting diagonally toward the speaker on the door panel and consequently bringing his upper torso an inch or so from her face. But even that wasn't near enough. 

So she used her tongue to close the distance to his nipple. 

Vegeta emitted a sound that could not by any stretch of the imagination be classified solely to a single category; it was as though a growl, a gasp, a whimper, and a roar had been contending for an exit from his vocal chords, and had somehow been squeezed out all at the same time. His eyes were bigger than she ever remembered seeing them, threatening to pop out of their sockets if his lids retracted any further. His entire body snapped back as though he'd just been struck by an unseen Perfect Cell-caliber haymaker. 

This was exactly what Goku had been counting on. Harnessing every last scrap of defiant strength her numb body could possibly spare, she bucked as hard as she could. 

Vegeta went flying. 

On cue, the red lights winked out and were supplanted by the standard fluorescent lighting. The room whined mournfully as the gravity inducers ceased their functioning. 

The collision of wall and his left shoulder was enough to jar Vegeta out of whatever state of shock he'd allowed himself to slip into, and it didn't take long for his mortification to evolve into a more comfortable emotion like rage. His Super Saiyan aura blazed like a lit inferno, green eyes sparking as he veered toward the object of his wrath. 

Kakarotte lay across the room, on her side, her back to him, her body curling delicately inward like a wounded gazelle. Vegeta was upon her in an eye-blink, a compact, lethal Super Saiyan package of gold and flesh and navy blue bristling with righteous electric fury. 

He hauled her up by the front of her ridiculously worded shirt, ready to mete out some much-needed retribution. "You—you—how _dare _you—I'm going to—" 

"Oh, pleasthe!" 

Vegeta stopped, his rage temporarily thawing into irked confusion as he saw that Kakarotte had pulled her collar up past her chin, and was frenetically blotting her tongue on it. 

"Ptuh! Pwah." She gazed at him accusingly with one eye, her tongue peeking out from between her petulant lips like a curious pink candy. "You think you got the bad end of that deal? You're not the one who got to taste yourself." 

The right side of Vegeta's eye acquired a dangerous tic. His left nipple began to tingle madly in sadistic reminder. 

"I mean, have you ever licked yourself after a workout? You're sweaty and salty and dirty and—" 

Before she had the chance to expand any further—or before Vegeta had the chance to shut her up in a violently creative manner—the gravity room door suddenly slid open, and in marched Chi-Chi and Bulma. 

"Always knew one day I'd need to override the controls for this room," Bulma was muttering to Chi-Chi. The two of them stopped in their tracks as they caught sight of their spouses: the male one was bending over the female one, the former clutching the latter's shirtfront in his fist and the both of them wearing expressions reminiscent of underground dwellers who had just stumbled into sunlight. 

Chi-Chi swept across the room like a minor hurricane, displacing a sizable amount of air particles—and, consequently, Vegeta—in her rush to get to her ailing husband. "_Goku_! Oh, Goku, are you all right?" She took in the faintly incarnadine tinge on her husband's complexion, the perspiration-soaked shirt, and the deeper-than-necessary breathing pattern. "Goku, you're burning up!" 

"I'm all right, Chi-Chi. Really." Her husband pulled herself to an upright sitting position, letting her overworked muscles acclimate themselves to the restored gravity level. "I'm just a little sore." 

Chi-Chi's face immediately took on the quality of a storm cloud, and Bulma's eyebrows shot up and concealed themselves beneath the blunt cut of her powder-blue bangs. They turned _en masse_ toward the only physiologically correct male in the room. 

It didn't take very long for their combined stares to get on Vegeta's nerves. "What?" he snapped, and powered down to his normal state. 

Bulma shook her head at him. "Really, Vegeta," she sighed. "Goku's only been a girl for just one day. Couldn't you at least behave yourself around her?" 

For some seconds the only response the prince could produce was an unintelligible succession of horrified, disbelieving sounds. Finally he managed to salvage enough of his oral abilities to yell, "And just _what _the hell do you think you are implying, Woman?" 

"I'm _implying _that you should know better than to force Goku into another silly fight with you while she's like this. I should've known that your macho ego wouldn't be able to resist challenging her while she's female." 

"Yeah, Vegeta," chimed in Chi-Chi as she helped Goku to her feet. "Shame on you, taking advantage of my Goku like that!" 

"I am not taking advantage of Kakarotte," Vegeta denied heatedly. He couldn't believe it; _he'd_ been the one who'd been wronged and they were banding around Kakarotte in that estrogenic, cultish way women did when one of their own was being persecuted by the opposite sex. And Kakarotte wasn't even a real woman. 

Bulma's ears pricked up at the subtle change in his articulation of the other Saiyan's moniker. " 'Kakarotte'?" she echoed. 

Vegeta fastened his gaze on a hairline crack on the nearest wall; he really did not feel like providing an explanation. 

" 'Kakarotte'. Is that like the feminized version?" pressed Bulma, sounding incongruously amused. Goku blinked up between the two of them, while Chi-Chi seemed revolted by the very idea. 

"What?" she exclaimed. "It's bad enough that you don't call my husband by his—her—real name, but now you're going to call him—her—a girl's name, too?" 

Vegeta was beginning to regret his knowledge of Saiyan onomastics. "It'd be absurd for me to keep calling her a male name when she is obviously not one! Furthermore, Kakarotte is _my_ subject, and I will call her whatever I want!" 

Chi-Chi drew herself to her full height, preparing to do verbal battle, but Bulma stopped her with a dismissive gesture. 

"Aw, let him," she said. "At least he isn't calling her a noun, the way he does with everyone else. And hey—" She tossed a smirk at her cantankerous-looking hubby. "—at least we finally know that he's noticed." 

"Notice what?" Vegeta demanded in spite of his better judgment. 

"That Goku's female," said Bulma, very matter-of-factly. 

Vegeta's face was perilously close to attaining a scarlet hue; the tingling in his nipple was escalating to a near-unbearable degree. "Woman, what kind of fool do you take me for? Of course I know Kakarotte's female! Why the hell wouldn't I notice something like—" 

"All right, all right. Relax. I was just saying. Geez." Bulma surveyed him in concern. "Honestly, Vegeta—you're really paranoid today." 

"And touchy," Goku piped in helpfully. "Don't forget touchy." Vegeta noted darkly that she was discreetly wiping her tongue on the rim of her collar, no doubt part of her continuing quest to exterminate the flavor of him from her taste buds. 

"And touchy," agreed Bulma. "Vegeta, is there something wrong with your chest? You look like you want to scratch it or something." 

Vegeta jerked his hand away from his left pectoral. "Nothing," he ground out. "Is there a reason you've barged into my gravity room, or did you just come in here to pester me with all these useless questions?" he grated on, eager for a change in topic. 

"Oh, that's right. I almost forgot." The blue-haired woman aimed an ominously benevolent smile in her childhood friend's direction. "Chi-Chi and I were talking and she told me about your...problems, Goku. So I said, sure, I'd be glad to lend you some of my bras." 

Vegeta hacked like a malfunctioning car engine. "Couldn't you have just told me that it was none of my business and left it at that?" 

"And _then_," Bulma went on, pointedly ignoring her better half, "I thought that we could all go shopping." 

"What for?" Goku asked, acknowledging the shrill of warning klaxons going off in her head. 

"For clothes, of course! You honestly don't think you're going to wear that...interesting shirt everyday, don't you? Besides..." Bulma inspected the attire in question and wrinkled her nose. "You've gone and made that shirt all sweaty. What you're going to need is a whole new wardrobe." She said it as though she were offering the taller woman a four-course buffet on a snack tray. 

"A new wardrobe?" Goku's arms were crossed over her waist, clutching protectively at the sides of her tee. "Bulma, I'm not going to be a girl forever, you know!" 

Bulma made a flippant flicking motion with her wrist. "Psshh, I know that! But I've been wanting to pick up some new outfits myself, and if we happen to do so while we're picking up clothes for you, then that's all the better, isn't it?" She patted a finger against her cheek, constructing a mental shopping list as she sized Goku up. "Hmm...if you're going to get some bras, you might as well get your own panties..." 

"_Woman_!" exploded Vegeta, the tic in his eye developing into a minor seizure. "Do you absolutely have to discuss this in my gravity room?" 

Bulma rolled her eyes at the prince's theatrics. "Oh, ex-_cuse_ me if I've offended your delicate royal sensibilities. C'mon, Goku, Chi-Chi. Let's leave his Highness to his all-important training." She walked out of the room in a huff, murmuring to herself. "The man doesn't blink an eye when it comes to blood and gore, but talk about women's underwear and he goes all to pieces..." 

Chi-Chi and Goku went to follow her out. Goku was the last to exit, her movements ginger and unhurried, but halfway out the door she pivoted and regarded the other Saiyan. Vegeta was half-standing, half-leaning against the console, scowling down at one of the panels as if trying to set it on fire through sheer force of will. 

His nipple felt like it was about to spontaneously self-combust, and he wondered, fleetingly and irrationally, if she'd poisoned him with her saliva, if fluids from female Saiyans were somehow toxic to him. He shook the absurd thought away and met her gaze balefully. Under the insipid fluorescence, the Kakarotte standing at the door bore little resemblance to the Kakarotte he had pinned down under the lurid red lights. 

She held up her index finger. 

"Round one to you, Vegeta," she said solemnly, and walked out, taking the chafing, oppressive ambiance of the room with her. 

Vegeta turned his back on the console and braced his palms against its circumference, listening to his internal systems slowly resume their normal speed of function. 

He felt a sudden geyser of anger, and barely restrained himself from driving his arm elbow-deep into wires and circuitry. 

Kakarrot—the male version—had been someone the Saiyan prince had learned, over and over again in spite of himself, not to underestimate. Kakarrot would push back when pushed, and would not hesitate to use what means he had at his disposal, no matter how unsavory, to extricate himself from any critical combat situation. 

Why then, thought the prince, had he ever assumed that Kakarotte—the female—would be any different? 

Vegeta pushed himself away from the console and swiped an involuntary hand over his burning left nipple. The one she'd touched. With her tongue. To get him off. 

He was going to _kill_ that impudent third-class gender-bent freak of nature. 

"Round one to you, Kakarotte," he growled at the empty room. 

* * *

The forwarding address on the envelope was the P.O. box Master Roshi used for any incoming mail to Kame House, and the name "Krillin" was scrawled on the back in a compulsorily neat script. 

Krillin handled it as though it were a bomb. 

"Krillin, what is that?" his wife queried abruptly from Kame House's entryway, her hands fisted against her Capri-clad hips. 

He lowered his arm, letting the envelope tap a restless staccato against his thigh. "Nothing, hon. Just a letter." 

Eighteen surveyed him skeptically, but she did not press the issue. "Hmph. At any rate, I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to go blow off some of my prize money at the biggest mall this side of the continent." 

Krillin was about to remind her that that particular mall was one thousand six hundred miles away, but then realized that she probably knew that. "You, uh, want me to come with you?" 

The blonde flipped her hair and let out a chuff. "Why? So you can carry my packages for me? Thanks, but no thanks. Besides, I know how much you enjoy sitting outside the dressing room waiting for me while I try on clothes." 

"Hey, _I _enjoy watching you come out of that dressing room," he cracked. And it was true, even though every time he saw her dressed up he would wonder what a woman like her was doing with a guy like him. 

"I'm sure you do. I'm taking Marron with me; she's outgrowing her wardrobe." She turned her back on him and began to walk back into the house, then halted just before she closed the door. Without glancing back at him she muttered, almost grudgingly, "If there's...anything you want me to get you..." 

The former monk felt a smile touch his lips at his wife's concession of affection. "No, thanks, Eighteen. You and Marron have a good time." 

She nodded curtly and disappeared inside, presumably to fetch their daughter. A few minutes later he heard her step out the back door and blast off from the opposite side of the island. 

He shielded his eyes from the lambent chill of the early-morning sun as he watched her figure—and the tiny child she held in her arms—grow smaller and smaller until his limited human vision could no longer distinguish her from the rest of the sky. It was only until then that he slowly trudged to the back of the island, where Master Roshi was lounging around on his hastily set up hammock and perusing the newest issue of his favorite lingerie catalogue. 

"I wish you'd stop ordering those things with my name," Krillin complained once his sensei was within earshot. "I mean, I didn't mind back when I was single, but I got a wife and kid now; you should see the looks I get when I stop at the post office." 

"Believe me, Krillin, they're just green with envy." The old man didn't even bother to spare him a look; the majority of his attention was reserved for the celluloid beauties cavorting about in the latest and laciest in barely-there fashion. "They probably think you're getting it for your wife." 

Krillin blinked. "Oh, yeah. I...hadn't thought of that." 

"That, or they're probably lookin' at you like that because they're wondering just what you're wearing under your clothes." 

"Fun-ee." Krillin fervently hoped that that wasn't the case. 

"Just telling you like it is." Roshi buried his nose deeper in his precious glossies and flicked his wrist toward his student in an impatient shooing motion. "Now buzz off, will ya? I never get to read any of my magazines when your wife and kid're around, so this happens to be my happy time." 

"But, Master Roshi...I got a letter." 

In some miniscule part of his brain that wasn't completely overrun by nubile young girls and their lacy undergarments, Roshi wondered why he had ever agreed to give up the hermit life and the unchecked privacy that went with it. "You _did_? Well, that's great, Krillin! Good for you! I knew one day you'd become popular. Now get lost!" 

"Oh, Master." Turtle extracted his head from his carapace and regarded the former hermit with exasperation. He was situated next to the hammock, having been appointed a makeshift table for a glass of lemonade and a stack of titillating reading material. "At least hear Krillin out." 

"Fine, fine!" Roshi closed his catalogue, using his finger to mark his place. He peered at Krillin, only slightly irritated. "What's up?" 

"I got a letter." 

"You already told me that." 

Krillin shoved the envelope into his former teacher's hand. "Read the mailing address." 

Roshi squinted down at the smudged ink, his shades slipping halfway down his nose. "It's from Orin Temple. What the heck is Orin..." 

"Isn't that where you used to live?" Turtle interrupted, addressing the younger man. "Before you came here to train under the Master?" 

Krillin nodded. 

"Well, what do they want?" demanded Roshi. "Don't tell me those monks want you back in the flock or something." 

"Actually, this isn't from the head monks." Krillin took back the envelope. "It's from my old...friends. Akoru and Walna." 

"Akoru and Walna, eh?" The Turtle Hermit stroked his beard. "Say, would they be any chance happen to be those two monks dressed in saffron robes you were talking to when you were qualifying for your very first World Tournament?" 

Krillin gaped at him, amazed at the extent of his ex-sensei's memories. "Yeah. Yeah, that's right. They used to pick on me everyday, pulling jokes, tripping me, making me mess up my monastery duties..." 

"They don't seem much like friends to me," observed Turtle. 

"Well, for Heaven's sake," said Roshi, "what do those bullies want with you now? A reunion?" 

"Sort of," Krillin admitted. "They want to stop by, see how their 'old friend' "—he made lagomorphic quotation marks with his fingers—"is doing." 

"What's the problem, then? You worried whether I'd mind some visitors? For a hermit, I think I've been pretty accommodating about having people overrunning my house and using the faculties and generally causing pandemonium..." 

"You think I should see them again?" The former monk frowned. "I mean, we're talking about guys who used to call me 'runt' and 'midget'..." 

"So what if you're still a runt and a midget?" quipped Roshi, blissfully disregarding Krillin's glower. "You've moved past that a long time ago. Heck, you helped save the Earth a couple of times. I think that means you've outgrown their image of you, right?" 

Krillin nodded, though there was still reluctance in his manner. 

"Then hey, why not tell 'em you'd be glad to have 'em over? Maybe they want to make up for all those years they mistreated you. Maybe it'd be good for you, too—give you some closure." 

"I don't need closure," Krillin objected, perhaps a bit too quickly. 

"Well, then, for the love of Dende—why the hell are you even discussing this with me if you've already come to a decision about it?" Roshi snapped peevishly. He fished out a red-capped marker from his gaudy tropical-print shorts, flipped open his magazine, and re-immersed himself in his little happy world of obliging females and their frilly underclothes. 

Krillin left him to his own devices; he was already immersed in his own little monologue. "Well...I guess...it wouldn't hurt if I did let them come over for a little while. Who knows? Maybe Master Roshi's right and they just wanna make peace. Besides, I guess it'd be nice to see faces from my old stomping grounds." He paused, eyeing the letter in his hand as if expecting it to object, then declared brightly, "All right. I'll write Walna and Akoru back, tell them they're welcome to stop by. Besides, I wouldn't mind finding how my old masters and fellow monks back at Orin Temple are doing." 

"Good for you, Krillin," cheered Turtle. 

Krillin was grinning toothily as he turned toward his ex-sensei. "Hey, Master Roshi, where do you keep the envelopes? It's been a while since I wrote a letter." 

"Er...it's in a box...top shelf...of my room. Yeah." As it was, the Turtle Hermit was having trouble juggling two subjects in his brain at once, especially if one of those subjects happened to be girls with scanty, near-transparent attire and the other a bunch of white papers folded together to accommodate other bunches of papers. "Uh, no, wait...that box's full of my magazines...uh, look in...the box on my table...no, that one's got my collection of bikini postcards..." 

"Oh, Master," Turtle said again, in the tone of the long-suffering. He glanced resignedly at Krillin. "I'll get it. I know where it is." He waddled off toward the house, ignoring Roshi's half-hearted protest as he took the lemonade and magazines with him. 

Krillin was about to start after him when Roshi exulted, "Hey, Krillin, whaddaya think of this?" 

The former monk turned toward him only to get an eyeful of glossy near-unclothed female. 

"Master _Roshi_!" He pushed the catalogue away from him, blushing severely. One of the lingerie models on the proffered page was circled in ruby ink; she was trussed up in a black number stippled with silver studs and numerous belt buckles, an obvious sample of what the S&M section of the catalogue had to offer. 

"So?" Roshi tittered, sounding not unlike a schoolgirl asking a pal her opinion of a cute outfit. "What do you think, Krillin?" 

"To tell you the truth, Master Roshi, it's not really your style." 

Roshi forgot to be careful with his new catalogue and used it to whack the younger man on his head. "Not for me, you nincompoop! For Goku!" 

Krillin was treated the unfortunate mental image of his strapping best friend suffocating in the bandanna-sized garb with the matching garters. A moment later he remembered that Goku was female now, and the blueness on his face promptly metamorphosed into crimson. "You want to get Goku a piece of lingerie?" 

"Now when you say it like that it sounds just _wrong_," sniffed Roshi, settling back into his hammock. 

"But...but..." Krillin stammered feebly. He was saved from having to explain its many levels of wrongness when he felt the tickle of a familiar fast-approaching ki. He scarcely had the time to twist his head in the right direction when Piccolo swooped down from the sky, stirring up a minor sandstorm as he landed. 

"Krillin." The Namek accorded him a curt, acknowledging nod. "The plan's changed. We can no longer afford to wait for the Supreme Kai to return with a solution to Goku's problem. We are going to get Goku and then we are going to hunt dragonballs, and then we are going to turn her back." 

"Dragonballs? What, right now?" Krillin searched Piccolo's rigid countenance and instantly deduced that something was up. "What happened, Piccolo? Did Babidi show up?" 

Piccolo bared his teeth. It might have been a smile or a sneer. "In a way. I found his corpse." 

Even that was enough to prize Master Roshi's gaze away from his precious catalogue. 

Krillin decided that he must have misheard. "His _what_?" 

"His corpse. Dende was appointed by King Kai to keep watch over Babidi's ship. He noticed some movement around the area earlier, but he didn't think it was Babidi, and I volunteered to check. There was nothing near the ship, but when I expanded my search, I found a cave two miles or so away. Inside were the remains of a fire and some half-eaten deer and boar. Further inside I found a body." Piccolo inclined his head, his chin sinking behind the bunched cloth of his collar. "I showed it to Dende, who contacted King Kai. He recognized it based on his knowledge of Bibidi the father, and he identified it as Babidi the son." 

Krillin made a time-out signal with his hands. "Wait, wait, hold on—correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Babidi supposed to be the most powerful sorcerer in the universe or something?" 

"King Kai seems to think so," remarked Piccolo, his tone indicating that he for one did not put much faith in King Kai's convictions. 

"Then how can he be _dead_?" cried Krillin. 

"My opinion is that the minion—or minions—he brought up here from Hell killed him, the same way they killed his underlings back in that ship." 

Krillin had an idea of where this was leading, and he didn't want to be the first to arrive at the likely destination. "Which means..." 

"Which means that with Babidi no longer around to serve, they're free to do whatever they damn well please." Piccolo's countenance grew even more stoic. "And if the Supreme Kai's theory proves right, then sooner or later—though something tells me it'll be sooner—they're going to make their move." 

"_Great_," Krillin commented. 

"When did this happen?" piped up Roshi, shedding his façade of innocent non-eavesdropper. "I mean, when did Dende notice that there was someone near the ship?" 

"Two hours ago," Piccolo answered. 

"Well, if this Babidi person's been dead for that long and his recruits've been running wild since then, why haven't they made a made a move yet?" Roshi wanted to know. 

Piccolo exhaled impatiently. "How should I know? Maybe they're still waiting for something, someone..." He paused, his ruminations taking a digressive path. "Although...did any of you sense anything strange around midnight last night?" 

"Around midnight?" Krillin stroked the pads of his index and middle fingers across his crinkled brow. "I'm not sure...what do you mean, anything strange?" 

"Like...an energy signature. A new one. Stronger than a normal human, but nothing as drastic as Cell's or Frieza's. I would've easily overlooked it—if it hadn't been so close to where Babidi's craft was." 

Krillin and Roshi exchanged uneasy glances. 

"Now what in the hell d'you suppose's going on there?" demanded the Turtle Hermit. "Some sort of convention?" 

* * *

The sky was a shade of cerulean that should have been consoling, but the color, unfamiliar and overly bright, stabbed the back of his corneas like thousands of tiny glass needles. Or perhaps that wasn't the color at all: it was the sunlight filtering through his lids, its non-scalding warmth alien on his skin. 

"Wouldn't we be less conspicuous inside of that cave instead of sitting here out in the open?" he asked irritably, for what must have been the fiftieth time since the two of them had teamed up. "Why the hell did we decide to relocate?" 

"_Because_, General, they would have eventually found us had we stayed where we were." His companion was sitting under the shade of a tree, his eyes closed and his stance relaxed in feigned meditation. Flecks of sunlight dappled his worn-leather skin, mutton-chop sideburns, thick mustache, and elevated black hair cropped short. He had the look of a war-weary veteran, even though he was only slightly older than the general was; there was a jagged scar intersecting the top of his left eyebrow all the way down over his closed left eyelid and the top of his weathered cheek. He was wearing a voluminous white robe-cape combo that nearly concealed the armor he wore underneath—as well as the brown tail he had coiled around his waist. 

"There's that 'they' again," groused the general. "Ever since our paths crossed you've been ranting about 'they' and you've never once bothered to enlighten me. Who the hell are 'they' and why the hell are we hiding from them?" 

"Because now is not the right time. Not yet. Not while my son still sleeps, and our numbers are few." 

"Your son? Why should I give a damn if your son is still asleep? He has done nothing but sleep!" The general shaded his eyes. He could still not get over the vibrancy of his surroundings: jades and olives around them, yellow ochre and burnt sienna a bit further off, all housed under an impossibly blue ceiling—vividness that could not have been accomplished with Hell's decidedly limited palette. "As for our being few in number—what the hell did you expect? Did you forget, old man, that our race is extinct?" 

The robed man cracked open his eyes. "If it is, then we should not even be here in the Living World, should we?" 

"_Almost _extinct," the general amended through gritted teeth. He did not like this man, this reticent, self-important second-class vassal who spoke to him with a cold politeness that only barely masked the contempt that bubbled underneath. Something about him nagged at the general's memory, which had been rusted by his time in Hell and all those years he had spent in Frieza's employ, hopping from planet to planet in an almost never-ending cycle of extermination until his mind gave up on trying to get a foothold on distinguishing details. "But that still doesn't change the fact that the rest of our race is dead and festering in Hell, while for some reason I alone have been returned to the Living World!" 

"What makes you think," the other man said coolly, "that you are and will be the only one?" 

The general gaped at him for the span of some seconds, uncomprehending, and then jumped to his feet, the ground shuddering underneath his massive frame. 

"Where are you going?" the robed Saiyan queried sharply. 

"I'm going to do what I should've done the moment I got here—I am going to find the prince." 

The older man gazed up at him as though he had lost his mind. "What?" 

"You heard me, old man. Whatever game you've got planned, I'm not going to be part of it. Not anymore. I got more important things to take care of." 

"How will you be able to find him?" challenged the sitting Saiyan. "Hell might have been obliging enough to permit you to retain your armor, but apparently that consideration doesn't quite extend to your scouter. What makes you think that you'll be able to find the prince among the billions of Earthlings out there?" 

The giant hesitated a bit, apparently not having considered this quandary. Then he decided with unconvincing bravado, "I'll _make _him come to me." 

With that, he took to the air in a blast of grass blades and upturned loam. 

For a moment Paragus contemplated hauling him back and reiterating the reasons why they could not risk confronting the prince or a certain party of Earth dwellers, but then he remembered that the elite could reduce him to dust if he so wished. That, and he really didn't give a damn what happened to the latter. 

After all, Paragus thought cynically as he watched Nappa fly toward certain catastrophe, the general had laughed in his face, on that fateful day in planet Vegeta's throne room, when Paragus had begged the indifferent king for the life of his newborn son. 

* * *

End of Chapter Six  


* * *

**Closing Notes:** Incidentally, am I the only one who hasn't seen another Goku-as-a-girl fic? I mean, I've seen scabs of Vegeta ones (half of those seem to involve the Jusenkyo Springs), but not a single Goku-oriented one. I mean, that was basically why I tossed in this fic, just to buck the system. And then, of course, it somehow ballooned into this...oh, well. ^^  
  
**Next:** Goku is taken hostage on a shopping spree spearheaded by a determined Bulma and Chi-Chi, Piccolo and company orchestrate a dragonball hunt and Goku's new training regimen, a prince and his friend cross paths with the vengeful Nappa, and Shin and Kibito encounter a Saiyan in Hell named Bardock.  
  



	8. Seven: Vendettas

**Mailing List:** http://www.geocities.com/echelon002/   
  
_**Author's Notes:** Well, I suppose I'm going to have to address this sooner or later: there've been a couple of readers who've been less than enthusiastic, so to speak, regarding the whole gender-switch issue. I get the impression that I'm being asked to write something a bit more..."mainstream", I guess, is the word.   
  
This's the first Dragonball fic I've ever written, and probably the last; I don't think I have it in me to write another (except maybe a short Krillin family piece). I wrote the first parts more on a whim than anything else, and then it became...this. I don't know whether it's supposed to be serious or funny or whatnot, but I'm pretty okay with how it's going. I get to tackle characters' psyches along with the usual battle scenarios; I'm able to delve into Saiyan culture and history and the connections between Heaven and Hell and everything in between; I can explore how a change in one person can affect a whole dimension—all of these I can tackle in this fic. What it all boils down to, I suppose, is that if one isn't comfortable with the subject matter, then one doesn't have to read it.  
  
Okay, I need to get to the reviews. Thanks to everyone who provided them. :) I'm sorry I can't reply to every one. It's that space thing, you know.  
  
G-jin: Hmm...I really haven't seen any of the Dragonball girls wear spandex, so there wouldn't be any to lend to Goku. Vegeta's the only one who might have some, but I doubt he'd let Goku borrow any. ;P  
  
Hyperbole: I'll read your fic if you decide to write it. :) As for Buu, well, don't count him out just yet. And er...Bardock (one of my absolute favorite characters __ever_) shows up in the next installment. I tried and tried and I couldn't fit him into this one. ~_~  
  
Well, I gotta cut it off here. Thanks as always to everyone for the reviews; they aid a great deal in my speed. Want me to go faster? Drop me a note. ^_^ 

* * *

The Kakarotte Factor  
by Echelon  


* * *

  


* * *

Chapter Seven:  
Vendettas  


* * *

Unlike Trunks, who came into the world with approximately three wisps of lavender fuzz on top of his head, little Goten had been born with a full crown of thick, soft black spikes and a tail, looking eerily like a Saiyan pureblood. The fact had perturbed Vegeta to no end—how could the son of third-class Kakarrot possess more Saiyan characteristics than his own?—but the issue was exacerbated when Trunks grew a mane of floppy, pastel-purple hair more suited to an Earthling than a Saiyan half-breed. It had taken the prince a while to be convinced that the boy was, indeed, his progeny. 

Still, every now and then his disbelief would resurface, especially at times when he was feeling especially resentful toward a certain third-class Saiyan. The last time it had happened, Trunks had unfortunately overheard, and from then onwards, the little boy had developed the semi-involuntary habit of trying to yank the other demi-Saiyan's hair out of their roots whenever he got the chance. 

"_Oww_!" the younger child wailed as the other boy zipped by over his head and casually snagged a protruding spike from his scalp. 

"Whoops. Sorry, Goten." Trunks looked down at his offending hand and was profoundly disappointed to see only a few ebony strands there. "I guess it must've gotten caught. It's your fault, you know—it's that hairstyle of yours. It's like a bird's nest or something. Maybe," he suggested, trying not to seem too eager, "you oughta shave it or something." 

"No way," Goten declared vehemently. He was sitting on the oversize suede couch that dominated the living room, safely ensconced between the three or four enormous vanilla-colored throw pillows he'd propped up around him to form an improvised bastion. 

"But you'd have a lot less hassle without hair," argued Trunks. He plodded over to the other end of the couch, flopped down, and arranged himself into an inverted position, his legs sprawled vertically against the cushions and his neck dangling over the edge of the couch. "You wouldn't hafta wash it everyday, and you don't hafta go for haircuts and stuff, and people wouldn't keep getting their hands caught in it." 

"_You're _the only one whose hand keeps getting caught in it," reminded Goten. "You're kinda clumsy, arent'cha, Trunks?" 

"I am not clumsy!" protested Trunks, adopting the deeply offended yet defiant tone of the falsely accused. "I'm actually grabbin' your hair, so that doesn't count!" 

Goten peered suspiciously at him over the rim of his marshmallow fortress. "Why're you grabbing my hair?" 

"Because I'm bored, that's why," the other boy retorted, and hoped that this would be the end of it. 

"You grabbed my hair because you're _bored_?" 

Trunks squinted at the upside-down TV screen. They were in the middle of some blockbuster martial arts action movie, complete with bombastic revolving-camera sequences, life-threatening stunts, and neutron-bomb-worthy pyrotechnics. 

It was driving the both of them to mind-numbing boredom. 

"Look at that," Trunks said as the onscreen bad guy leveled a city block with his flamboyantly hefty but nonetheless impressive shockwave-blaster-slash-bazooka-slash-super-gun. "See how it exploded? That was so fake. The smoke doesn't look right, and the rubble and stuff went flying the wrong way. It's so obvious that they used dynamite to blow it up." 

Goten was similarly educated in the dynamics of explosions, and easily confirmed his friend's observations. "Yeah. And look how they're fighting. They're so _slow_," he pointed out as the hero and villain engaged in blurry fisticuffs. 

Sluggish as it was to them, the sight of martial arts violence was enough to whet the average Saiyan's appetite for similar destructive activities, and Trunks was no exception. 

"Do you wanna stop by your dad's gravity room?" asked Goten, reading the older boy's mind. 

"Are you kidding? Once he gets inside he practically seals himself in there. We won't see him until dinner." Trunks's fingers twitched as the villain sent the protagonist through several windows and a wall. "Hey, Goten, this movie bites. I bet we could make a better fight scene." 

"Really? You think?" Goten's countenance lit up with excitement, which then dissolved a second later. "But, Trunks, remember what your mom said the last time we did our play-fight?" 

Trunks waited until he was sure his entire head felt swollen with diverted blood, then swiftly vaulted himself back to a proper upright position. "Oh, like we're supposed to be afraid of her?" he scoffed. 

"But she said that the next time we tore up any part of the house she was gonna cook for us," declared Goten. 

The tan drained from Trunks's complexion; even his father was known to flee—in his own overbearing and utterly composed way, of course—from his mother's so-called edibles. "Well, uh...well...we won't...we won't play-fight in the house then. Simple as that." 

Goten pushed down the front gates of his cushion stronghold. "Where're we gonna go play-fight then, Trunks?" 

Trunks hummed a snatch of some nameless fight tune as he mulled this over. Onscreen the hero and baddie chased each other across car hoods, fire escape stairwells, and brownstone roofs, shattering glass, demolishing brick, smashing concrete and asphalt as they ducked, swiped, and generally tried to kill each other. The tinny screams of the dismayed citizens were white noise against the movie's hard-rock destruction soundtrack as the camera panned back and up in a dramatic overhead shot of the ruined block. 

"Let's go fly around the city," Trunks said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Goten was peering closely down at a loose thread on the top of a pillow, his head tilted in the older boy's direction. Trunks reached out. 

"_Hey_!" 

"Sorry," responded Trunks, automatically. 

* * *

"Get _outta_ here! You tellin' me that Goku's a _chick_?" 

Piccolo glared down at the portly ninja, not bothering to hide his disdain. "Yes. And that is why I'm appointing you to collect two of the dragonballs." 

Yajirobe harrumphed, knotting his arms over his chest. "Why would I wanna do that?" he whined. "At least lemme see how she looks b'fore you turn her back." 

The Namek looked at him as though he were a chopped-off piece of Frieza's tail. "Get _going_." 

"All right, all right! So pissy. Yeesh." Yajirobe slipped the dragon radar Piccolo had given him into one of the pouches strung around his substantial waist and ambled off, murmuring to himself under his breath. "Ain't fair. Known the guy since he was a kid, but can't get to see him as a girl. Ain't fair at all..." 

Piccolo dragged his hand down over his face as Korin trundled over to stand beside him. 

"Why only two?" the cat wanted to know. "You could've asked him to get all seven balls." 

"It's faster that way." Piccolo watched as Yajirobe tossed a rope over the rail surrounding Korin Tower and began his descent. "I sent the others to fetch the rest." 

That task had been easier than it could've been. If Piccolo had nursed any lingering qualms regarding Goku's propensity for befriending people, they were all but eliminated: her allies were all too glad to aid her in her time of need. Yamcha, Krillin, Tien, and Chaotzu had each agreed to retrieve one dragonball, using their own inherent ki radars to track them down—though Piccolo got the feeling that Tien and Chaotzu only half-believed his narration of the current events. 

"That makes six," observed Korin. "What about the last one?" 

"I'm in charge of that." 

Korin tapped his paw against his furry chin. "So Goku's been turned into a girl, eh? Must be fun." 

"Fun," Piccolo intoned stiffly, "is not the way I would describe it. More like someone's means to an end. That's why we need the dragonballs, to turn her back before this's used to someone's advantage." 

"I see." The cat nodded. "And why isn't Goku with you now?" 

Piccolo scowled: earlier he had flown to Capsule Corp. to pick up both Goku and the dragon radar, and had been less than pleased to find out that the former had just been taken hostage by Bulma and Chi-Chi on a shopping expedition. He would have tracked them down immediately had Mrs. Briefs not informed him, with much unwarranted glee, that they were going to buy undergarments—upon which Piccolo, with great discretion and more than a bit of chagrin, had decided to postpone his retrieval for at least an hour. "She's...preoccupied. I am going to fetch her later." He breathed in a whiff of thin high-altitude air, then turned and marched away. Korin tagged after him, having to scamper to keep up with the Namek's much longer strides. 

"Do you need a Senzu bean?" asked the cat, acutely heedful of some nameless upcoming conflict. 

"No," Piccolo affirmed. "Not yet, anyway." 

"Where are you off to now?" 

"I am going to get the last dragonball." He halted some feet away from the railing, ready to launch into the air, but something held him aground. 

Korin surveyed him with his eternally slanted squint. "What's wrong? Did you change your mind about that Senzu?" 

"No." The Namek's obtruding brow knitted in sudden thought. "I just realized something. We found Babidi's corpse. King Kai identified it. We all agreed it was him." He inclined his head, allowing Korin to fully see the perturbed glint in his eyes. "If Babidi _was_ the one who cast the spell on Goku, and he's supposed to be dead, then why hasn't the spell worn off yet?" 

* * *

Frieza was in a less accommodating mood than Cell, though Shin privately attributed this to his less than stellar condition (his ivory skin was now a checkerboard of scratches, sooty patches, and dried blood) and the fact that his father (looking no less battered himself) had harassed him with great merriment all throughout their interview (mostly regarding his son's mania with a certain Saiyan). After listening to their barbed exchanges for far longer than they would have wanted (at the end of which Frieza finally snapped and began tossing death balls), Kibito was duly convinced that Hell badly needed a psychiatrist of some sorts. 

Shin had laughed at that, obviously glad for the reprieve from the grimness that had permeated their current conversations, then reminded him that this was Hell, and there was no room for social workers in this place. 

Kibito had felt inclined to agree, but after tracking down the Ginyu Force, the gigantic King Slug and the icy Cooler, even Shin was starting to discern an epidemic of various Goku-related psychoses (Cooler had been especially unhelpful; his responses to the Supreme Kai's questions had all deviated into violent, rambling tangents about Super Saiyans and their annoying hair). By the time they had finished cross-examining all of Hell's elite, the both of them had come to one inexorable conclusion: under no circumstances should Son Goku be ever allowed to make a detour into Hell (again). 

"I just don't understand it," Kibito was muttering as he and Shin resignedly made their way back from the belly of the beast. "How could a single person—an Earthling, at that—have pissed off so many people in here?" 

"Saiyan," Shin said. 

Kibito blinked down at his somber-faced companion. "Eh?" 

"I meant—Son Goku is a Saiyan. Not an Earthling." The Supreme Kai breathed easier as the ground underneath their feet acquired an uphill tilt; the elevated levels were peopled with the lesser offenders—murderers instead of mass murderers, psychopaths who actually were unhinged instead of those who pretended to be, individuals who viewed slaughter and peccadillo as informal necessities instead of recreational activities. Not much of a sea change, Shin admitted to himself, but the ambiance was infinitely more bearable than where he and Kibito had just been, in the deepest bowels of Hell, breathing the same metaphorical air as the worst of the worst of what the universe had to offer. 

"I find it hard to believe that Goku could be of the same heritage as those thugs we ran into," muttered Kibito. 

"Well, he is—she is. It really is remarkable, isn't it? A protector born from a race of destroyers. The Saiyans were a truly formidable people. That would explain Goku's power, as well as Gohan's." 

By this time the ground was completely level, their backdrop now taking on the interior of an underground cavern, replete with stalactites and stalagmites that dripped from ceiling and floor like icicles. Shin took a seat on the next flat-topped rock-like outcropping he came across, intent on organizing his thoughts. Kibito was far too anxious to sit still, and elected instead to pace back and forth in front of his master. 

"All right," Shin began after a short pause. "Let's go over what we've learned so far. Not long after Babidi visited the Demon World to recruit Dabura, a commotion started up in the dimension below—Hell. It turns out that the one responsible was a single Saiyan, presumably acting under the guidance of his father. Perhaps it's just me, but I sort of got the feeling that the father might have conspired with the likes of Cell and Frieza—all of Hell's biggest notorieties..." 

"And all of whom seem to be on a first-name basis with Son Goku," Kibito pointed out. 

Shin glanced up at him, silver eyebrows lifting. "That's right. They do." 

"Then..." His assistant stopped in his tracks, stunned. "Master, are you saying that all of the chaos in Hell, all the panic in Heaven, the deserted ship, those dead bodies, Babidi's disappearance—all of this because..." 

"...of a vendetta?" the Supreme Kai finished for him. He ventured a weary smile. "Vengeance happens to be one of the very few things that can transcend generations, worlds, even dimensions. You should know, Kibito: Bibidi may be dead, but his evil lives on in his son." 

At the mention of the wizard, the both of them grew subdued again, their thoughts returning to their previous morbid states. Finally Shin raised his head. 

"We are operating on borrowed time, Kibito," he said quietly. 

"I know." Kibito panned his gaze over their environs. The area was wholly deserted, though its hollows echoed with the wails of disembodied voices and its walls were limned by bobbing outlines—the efforts of souls straining to find a way to break out from their allotted boroughs of Hell. "The ogres should be done reporting to King Yema. Perhaps we should visit him; surely by now he has the names of those who have yet to be accounted for." 

"Perhaps." But Shin's mind was still fixated on their preceding discussion. "Nonetheless, there are still a good number of questions that have yet to be answered. What did Babidi discuss with the father? How have his plans changed? What of their present whereabouts? For that matter, what of Buu's?" 

His assistant eyed him reluctantly. "What are you suggesting then, Master?" 

"I think...we haven't found out everything that we could have." Shin propped his left elbow on the palm of his right arm and massaged his chin with his left hand. "Perhaps we should pay another visit to the Saiyans." 

Kibito cringed inwardly at the thought of a return trip to that particular corner of Hell. "I highly doubt there's anything more we can extract out of them other than what little they've already told us," he said, trying to keep the petulance out of his voice. 

"You may be right." 

The two of them snapped their heads around at the unexpected intercession. Situated between two teeth-like flanges were two figures—a man and woman dressed in a markedly recognizable style of armor. The male was tall and brawny, with narrow, square-jawed features and elevated ebony hair pulled back into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck; the female was petite but built like a tri-athlete, her lighter-colored hair cropped tomboyishly short. 

"We don't usually rat on each other," the female went on; it was she who had spoken earlier. She eyed the two intruders circumspectly. "So if you're here to interrogate us, you are wasting your time." 

Shin recovered his powers of locution. "You are...Saiyans?" 

The female looked at him as if the question was the most ridiculous one that had ever been put to her. "Yes." 

"But...you are..." Kibito was similarly mystified; there weren't supposed to be any Saiyans on any of the elevated levels. For a race like the Saiyans, who had been assured of a place in Hell long before the bulk of them were eradicated, traipsing beyond the boundaries of their assigned Underworld district was next to impossible. 

"You are accusing me of lying?" the female snarled. The belt she wore around her waist suddenly twitched of its own volition, and Shin and Kibito started as they realized that the "belt" was round, brown, and furry—a tail. 

_Of course,_ thought Shin. _The Saiyans had tails. I can't believe I forgot._

"No, not at all," he said out loud. "It's just that, well...we really didn't expect to see Saiyans...on this level." 

The male spoke up for the first time, his gentle, pensively amused baritone catching both Shin and Kibito unawares. "You mean this far away from the other Saiyans?" 

Before Kibito could answer in the affirmative, the female butted in, her tone acid. "If you have nothing more to do here than ask us these questions, then we're going to have to ask you to leave." 

Countless epochs of being the Supreme Kai had rendered Shin nothing but skilled at playing peacemaker. "We mean no harm. We are merely passing through." He ventured an introduction. "My name is Shin, and my companion here is Kibito." 

The female ogled the both of them suspiciously until the male noted, serenely: "Come on, Celipa—do they really look like they could be from around here?" 

The thought of anyone actually believing that the Supreme Kai could be a local of this forsaken place made Kibito bridle, but Shin seemed pleased at the male's observation. "Well, we're not. The only reason we're here is for information." 

The female—Celipa—was silent a moment, then muttered, rather reluctantly, "If you must know, the only reason we're not with them is because of our commander." 

Shin cocked his head to one side, frankly astounded at the admission. "There are more of you?" 

The two Saiyans linked stares and seemed to conduct a lengthy and complex conversation with their eyes. Before Shin and Kibito had the chance to feel voyeuristically guilty, the female broke her gaze and whirled back toward them. 

"There's us," she said gruffly, as though trying to be annoyed with their line of questioning. "Me and Toma." She jerked her thumb back toward the male, then jerked it in another direction, indicating other non-present individuals. "Then there's Totepo and Pamboukin. And, of course, there's our commander...and his family." 

Kibito was still not wholly persuaded. "That still does not explain how you have all come to be here." 

"We are a crew," Toma asserted steadily, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Our commander couldn't stay with the others below, and he needed us. What else could we do but follow him here?" He exhaled, slow and sad. "We may be Saiyans, Shin, but not all of us turn our backs on our own." 

Shin didn't know what possessed him to ask it: curiosity, maybe, over the fact that such a bloodthirsty and perfidious people could somehow bend the laws of Hell to stand by one of their own. "What happened to your commander?" 

Celipa pursed her mouth, clearly unwilling to share, but Toma was far more obliging. 

"Our commander," he said carefully, "has a gift." 

Celipa chuffed at his wording. "Gift. That's one way to put it. He can barely function sometimes, all because of his 'gift'." 

Toma sighed. "He sees things," he told Shin and Kibito, almost apologetically. 

"Hallucinations?" Kibito theorized in spite of himself. 

He was promptly lanced by a two-punch combo of rebuking eyes. 

"Not hallucinations," Celipa said with some fervor. "Something more." 

Shin was suitably intrigued. "May we see him?" 

The other three looked at him with a diverse assortment of emotions: disbelief from Kibito, distrust from Celipa, thoughtful hesitancy from Toma. 

It was Toma who got the last word, but only because he found his voice first. "We'll take you to him." 

Celipa glowered at him in open disapproval, but his only response to this was a tiny smile and a diffident shrug before he turned and sauntered off. She settled instead for shooting the two intruders admonitory looks, then pivoted and stomped after her companion. 

Kibito was stunned. "Master..." 

"Bear with me for a while, Kibito," Shin requested, and started off after the departing Saiyans. 

His assistant had no choice but to follow him, down into this strangely isolated subterranean level of Hell. 

* * *

People made fun of Bento because he worked in an upscale underwear boutique in West City Shopping Mall. 

Even his girlfriend mocked him for his occupation—that is, when she wasn't busy snubbing him or pelting him with bathroom items for yet another imagined slight—but he endured it (inanely, everyone thought) because he knew something about working in upscale underwear boutiques: they drew females—gold-card-toting, botox-and-silicone-augmented, classy-yet-secretly-nymphomaniacal females—like bees to honey. 

Of course, not everyone who frequented _Valencia's Secret_ fit those oh-so-desirable parameters—there were always those over-the-hill matrons who insisted on fitting negligees at least three sizes too small, or those embarrassed-to-hyperventilating males trying to choose the perfect intimate gift for their significant others, or the occasional meathead whose sole purpose was to follow him around asking very loud and very ribald questions about women's undergarments. But they were worth it, because Bento noticed that the store patronage seemed to conform to a very specific karmic balance: the more unattractive a customer, the more stunning the next one tended to be. 

So far today Bento had serviced two three-hundred-pound women who insisted vigorously that they were size tens, an octogenarian who required his personal opinion of several bra-and-panties combos, and at least five Neanderthals who had trailed him around the boutique, sniggering incessantly like schoolgirls sharing a secret. Bento figured that it was way past time for karma to pay him his due. 

The boutique's doorbell dinged daintily, signaling the entry of yet another customer, and Bento had to mentally recite a few calming stanzas from his salesman handbook before he went to meet him/her. 

It turned out that the customer was in the plural: three women, to be exact. The one in front he swiftly recognized as Ms. Briefs, a loyal patron of the store (an attractive enough lady, though presumably taken in spite of her lack of a wedding ring; she was mother to a purple-topped hellion who had once reduced the security personnel to shuddering, gibbering piles of mucus and tears—personally, Bento had nothing but pity for the kid's father). Directly behind her was another woman who appeared to be the stereotypical country housewife, from the tight bun on top of her head down to the modest nondescript Chinese-style outfit. She wore no makeup and appeared to be more matronly than she actually was. She also seemed to be unfamiliar with the merchandise; she kept glancing around at the rows of danties as though trying to figure out what their purpose was. Lagging behind the two was a walking mountain of brand-name garment boxes and boutique bags. 

"Goku, are you chewing my shirt again?" Ms. Briefs asked placidly, checking out a stack of nighties near the entrance. 

The mountain stopped moving. The boxes and bags did a casual landslide onto a well-situated decorative loveseat, and Bento could see for the first time that the "mountain" was, in actuality, a young woman. 

A young woman who, for reasons unknown to him, seemed to be sucking determinedly on her front neckline. 

"Goku?" pressed Ms. Briefs. 

The Goku girl wiped her tongue one last time on the fabric, then spat it out. "No." 

She was...Bento couldn't find a word to describe her. The first thing he riveted on was her hair—dark and untamed, looking as if it were suffering a permanent case of static shock. Nestled in between the wayward spikes was an incongruous blue-and-white headband, which she bore like a crown of thorns. Her ill-at-ease bearing and her uncomplicated demeanor convinced Bento that she was the youngest of the three—and also the least girlishly-inclined. Her face and body seemed inordinately incompatible: a face that suggested that she was incapable of harm—big midnight-velvet eyes and ingenuous mouth—on top of a body designed to incite twelve-car pileups if it was ever set loose on the freeway. 

Bento had to tilt all the way to one side to take her all in. 

"Is there any mouthwash around here?" Goku asked, her voice much too loud in the confines of the boutique. 

"Goku, hush." Ms. Briefs smiled at her with all her teeth showing, then turned to acknowledge Bento. "Hey, there! How's it going?" 

The young man pulled himself back upright, the very picture of deference. "Good afternoon, Ms. Briefs." 

"How many times do I have to tell you, Bento? My mother's name is Ms. Briefs. Call me Bulma." The blue-haired woman paraded up to him, planted her elbow on the counter, and gave him a conspiratorial wink. "Hey, listen. I'm feeling generous today, so I thought I'd buy some much-needed undergarments for my friend here." She seized Goku by the shoulder and yanked her forward, ignoring the other woman's alarmed yelp. "So what do you think, Bento? Got any suggestions?" 

Bento was careful to keep his gaze above Goku's chin. He had already established that the girl wasn't wearing a bra underneath that ruffled-front tank she had on, and his brain was already filling with more suggestions than was strictly necessary. "Uh...yeah. Er, actually, we just got a new shipment of...um, what exactly are you interested in?" 

"Bras, panties, lingerie—you name it, she needs it," Bulma announced, expertly blindsiding whatever protest the Goku girl might have made. 

The second female—the one with the bun—looked askance at her blue-haired friend. "Bulma...you're not actually going to buy her a whole set of...of..." She gestured feebly around at their flimsy, lacy, satiny surroundings. "...these....things, are you?" 

But Bulma had already warmed to her altruistic motives. "Why not? I've got six platinum cards burning a hole in my wallet and one of my very best friends is in dire need of suitable underwear. Besides, have you taken a good look at her lately, Chi-Chi?" She mimicked an award ceremony hostess, rolling her hands toward Goku's chest as though it were the proffered trophy. "That ain't an A-cup there, people. She's gonna need some support." 

Goku's arms sprang up to shield her upper torso; it had almost become as much of a reflex action as a backhand, or an elbow to the solar plexus. "A-cup?" she echoed dubiously. 

The way she said it made Bento realize that she had no idea what she was talking about. "You don't know?" he burst out, and felt a fuzzy melting sensation when the Goku girl turned her big dark eyes on him. 

"Should I?" she queried in puzzlement. Bento had to stifle the urge to facefault. 

"Oh boy. All right, Goku, listen." Bulma curled her fingers as though she were clutching an invisible tennis ball. "A-cup. Like..." She glanced around and pointed at a passing straw-haired woman with limbs like cleaning pipes and a frame that looked like it weighed approximately eighty-eight pounds. "There! That one. Definitely an A-cup." 

The woman overheard her and shot her a dagger-filled glare, but Bulma was far too immersed in her extemporized lecture to notice. "Now, B-cup's more like this." She slightly widened the span of her fingers so that the unseen tennis ball swelled into an unseen pomegranate. "All right, like that." 

Bento hooked a finger under his collar and tugged; Bulma's discourse on bra sizes was beginning to snare a healthy amount of stares of the other store patrons, most of them females. Even the males lingering outside _Valencia's Secret _seemed to be inching closer to the entrance. 

"As you can see, the B-cup's a little bigger." Bulma jabbed her index finger toward the other brunette. "You ought to know—Chi-Chi's a B-cup." 

If Bento wasn't certain as to whether the entire store was listening, he got his answer when multiple heads swiveled toward the woman in question, creating a minor draft inside the boutique. 

Chi-Chi crossed her arms fiercely over her front and glowered at the unwanted onlookers, who immediately resumed their respective pretenses of minding their own business. 

Goku, however, continued to eye her raven-haired companion in sudden fascination. "You're a B-cup?" she asked, almost delightedly. 

"I'll have you know," Chi-Chi told her with a huff, "it's the heavier end of a B-cup." 

Goku seemed both perplexed and enthralled by this hitherto unknown nugget of information. Bento could not figure out for the life of him why this could be so. 

Bulma patted Chi-Chi's shoulder. "Hey, I used to be that size, too. Now..." She tossed back her own shoulders and indicated her chest, grinning slyly. "C-cup all the way." 

It was her turn to be pelted by stares. 

"And then, after the C-cup," the blue-haired woman went on without missing a beat, "there's the D-cup." 

Goku seemed to be trying to work out in her mind the notion of altering breast sizes, but she ventured, "And after the D-cup, there's the E-cup, right?" 

Bulma shook her head. "No. It stops at D-cup." 

"No E-cup?" 

"Nope. D-cup's the final measurement. There's nothing after that, not unless you count the double-D-cup. That's the kind that look like you've shoved watermelons down your shirt." Then she added wickedly, "Kinda like yours." 

Bento felt a second draft as an abundant quantity of heads turned once again. 

Goku was oblivious; she gaped at her grinning blue-haired friend in horror. "No, they're not!" she protested, genuinely distressed, and Bento found himself strangely charmed even as he wondered what rock this girl had been living under all her life. "Watermelons're bigger!" 

Bulma rolled her eyes. "Geez, Goku, don't have an aneurysm or anything. I was kidding. They're not _that _enormous. I bet they're a middle-to-heavy C-cup." She shifted her attention back toward the spellbound Bento. "So, kid...you got a bra you think would be perfect for my incredibly naïve friend here?" 

"We have the very latest and hottest _Valenica's Secret _strapless bra," Bento recited before he could censor himself. "A chest like that deserves nothing less to showcase it—" 

Chi-Chi slammed her fist down on the counter, leaving a spider's-web design of radial hairline cracks on the damask-colored wood. Bento very nearly scaled the wall behind him. "My husband's chest does not need to be _showcased_!" 

Through his fright, Bento had to stop and rewind his thoughts. Did she actually call Goku her _husband_? 

"Aw, relax, Chi-Chi. He didn't mean anything," Bulma said. She appeared completely unmindful of the other woman's slip of the tongue, and for that matter, neither did Goku. Bento was greatly thankful; perhaps he had been hearing things after all. 

Goku scrunched up her face. "Do I really have to wear a bra?" she complained. 

Beyond her Bento saw a young man opening his mouth, obviously to voice a veto, and was summarily bopped by his annoyed girlfriend. The action was repeated more than a few times by various other couples. 

"_Yes_, Goku, you do," Chi-Chi told her categorically. "Once you get some support, it'll be a lot easier for you to move around. Trust me—for someone like you, there's no way around it." 

It didn't take long for the younger woman to yield. "Okay. Fine. I'll get one." 

"Good for you, Goku!" Bulma enthused. She fluttered over to a bra rack draped with magenta silk and selected a lacy ebony number, which she held up for inspection. "Oooh, check this one out. Doesn't this look just so romantic?" 

Goku glanced at the scalloped-cup strapless bra and noted with dismay that she could see Bulma's beaming face through the material. "Bulma...I don't think I necessarily want a _romantic _bra." 

"Fine, fine. Sheesh, excuse me for trying to share with you my excellent taste in clothing." Bulma returned the bra to the rack, and Bento was profoundly disappointed. "All right, Goku, what kind of bra do _you_ want?" 

"Well..." Goku examined the floor with gratuitous interest as she twiddled her fingers. Bento could almost swear she was blushing. "Um...I want a simple one, you know...no lace and ruffles and stuff...just a plain white cotton one." 

Bulma looked like her fashion sense had been mortally stabbed through the heart. "What? That's it? A plain white cotton bra? Please, Goku, that's so...so...blah." 

"What's wrong with wanting a bra like my wife's?" she countered defensively, and turned to the other brunette as if for confirmation. "C'mon, Chi-Chi, tell her that's what you're wearing now." 

Bento lost his balance and hit the marble boutique floor with a loud _thwack_. There were more than a few similar reactions from those within eavesdropping range. 

Chi-Chi reddened, snatched up a nearby bra the color of candle wax, and thrust it at the other woman. "Here, Goku. Go try this on." 

Goku blinked down at the undergarment, but it was opaque and it looked just like one of Chi-Chi's, so she nodded readily. "Okay!" She started off, then stopped. "Um...try it on...right here?" 

Bento, who had just begun to pull himself back to his feet, lost his hold on the counter's edge and collapsed back down on the floor. 

"Uhhh...I don't think so, Goku." Bulma clamped her hands over the younger woman's slender shoulders, rotated her in the appropriate direction, and pointed. "See those stalls over there? You can try it on in there. You sure that bra's the right size? Here, bring this D-cup with you. Just in _case_," she added at Goku's skeptical expression. "Now, go on. Go. Shoo." 

Goku trotted off dutifully, and both Chi-Chi and Bulma released matching sighs of relief as she disappeared into the changing rooms. The store audience, deprived of their impromptu entertainment, rather reluctantly dispersed. 

Chi-Chi mopped her forehead with her shirtsleeve. "There's got to be an easier way to shop for Goku than this." 

"You're telling me." Bulma's cell phone trilled the latest Capsule Corp. advertisement jingle. She fished it out of her handbag, flipped it open, and pressed the headpiece into her left ear. "Hello. Bulma Briefs speaking." 

_"Bulma?"_

"Hey, Dad. What's up?" 

_"Er...actually, nothing, sweetheart." _

Bulma shook her head at her father's intermittent scatterbrained spells. "Then why'd you call?" 

_"Well...is Goku with you?"_

"She's...kinda busy right now, Dad. Why're you asking for her?" She cupped the base of the cell, suddenly wary. "Dad, does this have anything to do with her tests?" 

_"The tests—oh, no, honey, nothing's wrong with Goku's tests. I just...well, I'm just curious about her brainwaves."_

"Her brainwaves?" 

_"Yes. I was wondering...I'd like to ask her to go through a couple more tests, including an MRI scan."_

"Why..." Bulma watched as Chi-Chi poked curiously at a display of merrywidows. "Why would you want to have her go through an MRI scan, Dad?" 

_"Ah...I remembered something. Before the androids, before Cell, back when Goku was sure that she—then a he—was going to have that heart disease, I convinced her—him—to go through a quick but complete medical check-up. One of the tests I ran on him was an MRI scan. I was hoping to...well, do a comparison."_

Bulma still wasn't following. "A comparison? Why?" 

_"Bulma...Goku's DNA shows that, physically and genetically, she's an honest-to-goodness, 100% female. It could be that she's one psychologically as well."_

* * *

His tenure in Hell might have lasted either just a minute or the better half of a millennia—he wasn't sure—but however long or short it had been, it seemed that Earth hadn't changed all that much. Rolling emerald hills, alabaster urban jungles, sandstone arroyos: everything pulsating with life and color as though they had never once been targeted for annihilation by the Saiyan race. 

It galled him, the fact that these insignificant Earthlings continued to live, reveling in their helplessness and their ignorance, while his own noble race had been all but wiped out on the whim of a maniac. These humans were such flimsy, soft-shelled creatures, strangers still to intergalactic affairs and communication; how was it that they were still breathing while the Saiyans, for all their glorious might and promise, were not? 

A joke, Nappa decided sourly. It had to be some sort of twisted cosmic joke. 

He was passing over a city now, one that bore a moderate resemblance to the one he'd obliterated, once upon a time, on that fateful day he and Vegeta had landed on this planet seeking the dragonballs—and a traitor named Kakarrot. 

Just the memory of those names was enough to send his blood pressure skyrocketing, and he gazed down at the metropolis below, down at its happy, bustling citizens looking like so many ants, and a sinister grin slunk across his lips. Earth was about to experience a vicious case of déjà vu, and he was just the Saiyan to give it. 

"Hey, you can fly, too." 

Nappa did the airborne equivalent of a stumble. The gathering ki in his fingers dispelled as he wrenched his head toward the voice. 

For a second he thought his fury was making him hallucinate: there was a child hovering just a few feet above him—an Earthling boy with ridiculous fluffy purple hair and probing blue eyes. 

"I mean, you don't usually run into people up here," the child went on conversationally, while Nappa wrestled with the possibility that the Earthlings might have mastered the ability of flight while he had been dead. "There's not a lot of guys who can fly. Even my friend Goten just learned how to do it, and he's a whole lot stronger than you." 

The child's impertinence served as a spark to Nappa's already powder-keg state of mind, enough to make him halt in mid-air and wheel on the smaller flier. The boy could not have been even one-fourth of Nappa's size, but to his credit, he didn't so much as blink as the former loomed ominously over him. 

"You..." Nappa was almost speechless in his indignation. "You insolent _brat_! Do you have any idea who it is you are talking to?" 

The boy simply cocked his head to one side and crossed his arms, and the general was suddenly, chillingly reminded of his murderer. 

"No," the boy said, sounding almost bored. "Should I?" 

Under ordinary circumstances, Nappa wouldn't even have wasted his time on a youngster, and especially not an Earthling one. But the ire that had been festering inside him ever since he had woken up here on Earth—intercepted by a mad Saiyan too unimportant for him to have any recollection of—coupled with the onslaught of his returning memories, of his life and how it had ended, all conspired to strip away his rationale. Nappa was in the mood to destroy something, anything, and this boy, with his infuriating, unflinching conduct and his unconscious imitation of a certain prince, made a very tempting target. 

Nappa thought he saw the boy's eyes narrow a split-second before he swung his huge fist into the small face. 

There had been many, many individuals who had been on the receiving end of that kind of punch, and they all reacted in different ways. The really fragile ones were killed instantly, their skulls imploding like fruit. The sturdier ones lost only their jaws and mandibles, or their eyeballs, or had their noses smashed flat. The toughest ones, if they weren't instantly knocked out cold, were at least propelled back several feet by the force of the blow. 

The boy's reaction was none of the above. 

Nappa drew back his arm, his visage frozen in disbelief. The only proof that he had scored a direct hit was that the boy's face was now turned slightly to the side. That, and the sharp throbbing in the general's fist. 

"Boy, you're a touchy one," the boy remarked. His stance remained unchanged, and there was no sign of bruising on the struck cheek. "You call _that_ a punch? That's nothing compared to my dad. Heck, even Goten can hit harder than that!" 

Nappa could actually feel his mental faculties crumbling; how could he, a Saiyan elite, a general of armies, possibly be ineffective against a child—an _Earthling_ child, at that? His mind refused to compute it; he had to be delirious, perhaps he was still recovering from his inter-dimensional jet lag... 

"Hey, Trunks, who's your friend?" 

Moving through his stupor, the general twisted toward the second voice, and his shock increased a thousand-fold. 

Peering up at him, bright-eyed and cherub-faced, was a Saiyan child. No, not a Saiyan child—there was no sign of a tail, and he was wearing a pastel-colored outfit no Saiyan youngster in his right mind would wear. But the hair and coloring were undeniably Saiyan. 

And with good reason: the child was a carbon copy of Kakarrot. 

"How am I supposed to know?" asked the purple-haired aberration. "I barely began talking to him when he started swinging at me." 

"Really?" The dark-haired child regarded Nappa inquisitively. He was obviously younger than his fair-haired friend—probably just out of toddler-hood. "Are you a bad man, then?" 

The sight of that un-Saiyan innocence superimposed on those Saiyan features jarred Nappa; he had seen that kind of deviation before, only once, on Kakarrot's half-breed son. But this wasn't the same child, Nappa realized dazedly. Could it be...? 

"Well, of course he is, dummy," the other boy said in response to his younger friend's question. "He tried to hit me." He paused, his countenance taking on a crafty angle. "Heyyy...maybe we can use him for the fight scene. Whaddaya think, Goten?" 

"That's a great idea, Trunks!" The smaller child grinned up at the shell-shocked general. "Hey, mister, you wanna fight with us?" 

It was only then that Nappa was able to regain his oral capacities. "Fight with _children_? You dare mock me?" The muscles under his armor bulged, his battle ki shining murderously in his eyes. "Brat, you are talking to a Saiyan elite! The commandant of the entire Saiyan army—" 

The purple-haired boy didn't even grant him the courtesy of finishing his rant. "You're a Saiyan?" he scoffed. "You're such a liar. The Saiyans were wiped out a long time ago." 

Nappa spun on him, close to hysterical, and seized the collar of his neon-green sweater in a death-grip. "How," he practically spat into the boy's face, "do you know about the Saiyans?" 

Faster than Nappa could react, the boy tore the general's grip off of his collar with one hand and hurled him, almost nonchalantly, into the city below. 

Nappa tasted asphalt and gravel and soil, and was only vaguely aware of the sounds of triggered alarms and human screams through the roaring in his ears. By the time his body burrowed to a stop, he was far too deep down to climb out, so he gathered his energy and forced himself back up, shooting out of the ground like an enraged living missile. 

He touched down in the middle of a separate street, ignoring the cacophony that ensued—colliding metal and screeching rubber—as he combed the sky for his tiny prey. To his surprise and gratification, he saw the boys turn tail and flee, leaving two distinct energy trails daubed across the blue. 

Nappa felt an exultant grin split his dirt-coated lips. "Oh, no, brats," he growled. He sprung into the air in an explosive blast of power, toppling over several nearby humans and overturning a host of cars. "There's nowhere you can hide from me." 

For all the children's alleged strength (and Nappa was still not convinced that this was the case; the first punch had been an anomaly, and he had been caught off-guard by the older boy's feint—that was _all_), they were not very fast. Though the two had gotten a considerable head start, it didn't take long for the general to close the gap. 

Nappa had been planning to stop the youngsters dead in their tracks by grabbing each one by the scruff of his neck, but, without warning, the two suddenly stopped on their own and turned back toward him. The general halted as well, making sure that there was only a few feet's distance between him and his targets. He sneered down at them, making a show of cracking his knuckles. 

"For brats, maybe you aren't that dumb after all," he growled, his adrenalin pumping at the prospect of bashing these aggravating rugrats' heads together. "I see that you've figured out that trying to escape from me is useless." 

"_Escape_ from you?" the purple-haired boy parroted in disgust. "We weren't trying to escape from you. We were trying to lead you away from the city." 

"Yeah," piped up the Kakarrot-child, looking exceedingly satisfied with himself. "We even flew real slow so that we wouldn't lose you." 

The general slowly lowered his hands and looked down. True to the brats' words, they were now high above a rocky gulch that had bordered the outskirts of the city. He raised his gaze, his voice speciously quiet. "You...slowed down...for me?" 

"Of course. We can move a lot faster than that," the older one boasted. "But we had to make sure that we were far enough. I mean, if my mom gets riled over us messing up the house, then imagine how pissed she'd be if we messed up the _city_." 

If the Saiyan general had been over the edge before, he was certainly falling down that chasm now. These children—this purple-haired Earthling rugrat with his unprecedented knowledge of the Saiyan race and this tiny clone of the third-class Saiyan who had humiliated him—actually thought that they were _toying_ with him. He might have laughed out loud had he not been utterly overwhelmed with rage. 

And, as usual, he let his rage do the talking. 

He struck at the Kakarrot-child first. To his vexation, the boy easily vaulted over his fist like it were a toy hurdle. The punch he aimed toward his purple-haired friend missed by inches as the latter bent his waist to the left in a 45-degree angle. Nappa's subsequent blows were similarly unsuccessful; it was like trying to hit a pair of exceptionally energetic holograms. The children employed all the high-level speed tricks: blurring, afterimages, and illusion, sidestepping and dodging with a skill far beyond their years. And, as if to add insult to injury, they chattered animatedly back and forth with each other all throughout the one-sided skirmish. 

"Hey, Trunks, this guy's kinda slow. D'you really think he's a Saiyan?" 

"I don't know, Goten. I thought they were supposed to be a little better than this." 

"That's 'cause I don't think he can transform." 

"Nah, I don't think so. Hey, let's hit him." 

"I'm not sure, Trunks...I don't wanna hurt him." 

"Be _quiet_!" A blood vessel pulsed from Nappa's hairless scalp; he was slipping deeper and deeper into a berserker rage with each failed attack. He had to assert control now; he had to show these children just how much of a mistake they had made by choosing to provoke him. 

The Kakarrot-child stared up at him, and yet again Nappa was reminded of another child—a revolting Saiyan-human hybrid whose skull he had tried to crush underneath his boot because the former had startled him with his power. 

Nappa had never forgotten that child's affront to him. Kakarrot had come to rescue his son in the nick of time before the general could pay the boy back through pain. 

Well, Kakarrot was nowhere around now. 

"_Die, half-breed_!" 

He stretched his mouth open as wide as it could go and belched out a beam of deadly golden energy. 

It was one of his more advanced techniques, certainly not one he would have used so early in a fracas, and especially not on a petty child. But it was something he had been saving for a long, long time—a payback he owed to Kakarrot's half-breed spawn. And if he could not personally deliver it to the latter, then this little Kakarrot clone would be a more than suitable replacement. 

The child slapped the beam away as easily as though it were a piece of confetti. 

A petrified Nappa could only gawk as his own massive energy attack surged back toward him. 

* * *

He didn't know how long he was out, only that when he finally managed to pry open his eyes, all he saw was black. 

"...killed him!" 

"I'm telling you, he's not dead." 

There were voices, he was sure of it, but they sounded muffled, as though they were coming from a different room. 

Or a different ground level, Nappa realized as he felt the scrape of pebbles against his temple and chin. The beam that had been deflected toward him had driven him down into the valley below and imbedded the top part of his torso deep into the earth. 

He tried to dislodge himself amidst the ferocious objections of his cranium and upper body tendons. The loose rocks over his head shifted, allowing blades of light to stab through the blackness. 

The voices started up again, and this time they were distinguishable. 

"Look, Trunks! He's moving! He's still alive!" he heard the Kakarrot-child exclaim in delight. 

_Delight? _Nappa thought through his pain-filled haze. 

"Huh. He's tougher than he looks, Goten," the other boy replied. 

"This's so cool! We haven't had a playmate who lasted this long with us." 

"Yeah, even that meat-eating dinosaur we found last week." 

Nappa pulled his head free of the rock and collapsed on the ground, his head lolling to his side. His vision was a potpourri of multicolored dots overlaid against blinding white, and his brain felt like it had been shaken loose inside his skull. As it was, he barely acknowledged the noise of approaching footsteps. 

"Hey. Hey, mister," said the Kakarrot clone. "You alive?" 

"Whoa. He looks seriously messed up. Hey, Dad. That's the guy who was talking about—whuh—" 

A boot crunched into the stony ground in front of Nappa's rapidly clearing vision, and suddenly all thoughts of the children vanished from his mind. The boot was a pristine white, with golden-orange tips and a stiffly creased calf. There was only one armor in the universe that included this style of footwear. 

Nappa gurgled as a hand closed over his throat and forcefully hauled him up from the rubble. The hand was definitely not that of a child's. 

"Nappa." 

He knew that voice; he had known it from back when it had been a ten-year-old child's tenor, then a teenager's, before it had deepened into an adult's baritone. The voice had been that of his orphaned charge, his ally against Frieza, his companion during those planet raids, and then, finally, his executioner. 

Nappa lifted his head and locked gazes with the man who had killed him, all those years ago. 

"Prince Vegeta," he rasped. 

* * *

End of Chapter Seven  


* * *

**Closing Notes:** Before I forget, thanks to all for the girl-Goku fic recommendations! As a matter of fact, I finally located the one G-jin mentioned—too bad it's unfinished! :( I also found one called "Dan Dan Kokoro". It's good, too, enough to satisfy my current appetite for girl-Goku fics; I'm almost tempted to stop writing this and just indulge on the former. ^^ Geez, why didn't I see any of these fics before I started writing this? I gotta admit, I'm really, really tempted...   
  
For now, anyway, since there still aren't that many of those kinds of fics, I suppose I'm gonna have to content myself with doujinshi (incidentally, there seem to be a lot of girl-Goku doujinshi, even though there're few girl-Goku fics). Still, though the drawn stuff is certainly pretty to look at, their plots are mostly a mystery, since my Japanese's pretty much lacking. ~_~   
  
**Next:** Vegeta and Nappa reminisce on old times (sort of), one of the Z-gang runs into a (Legendary) complication on his dragonball hunt, Piccolo and Goku start the re-training (with a little help from Heaven), and Shin and Kibito _really_ meet Bardock (and his family).   
  



	9. Eight: The Prophet

_ **Author's Notes:** First up: I finally got the "The Kakarotte Factor's" mailing list up and working with substantial assistance from the always-helpful Skyle. So if you wanna be informed via a short e-mail whenever this fanfic is updated, just sign up here:   
  
http://www.geocities.com/echelon002/   
  
Anyway...that was a rather long gap between chapters, wasn't it? _ Well, in between the holiday influx at work, two new video games (one an RPG—and you __know _how long those run), and various other uninteresting and ostentatious reasons, I got rather sidetracked. Sorry about that...   
  
On a higher note, I got my first piece of fan art! Yeah, yeah, I can barely believe it either, but in addition to helping me design my ML web page, Skyle also sent in this picture of Male Goku/Female Goku inspired by the fic:   
  
http://www.geocities.com/echelon002/halves.jpg   
  
Personally, I think it's pretty good; she actually _looks _like Goku if he'd been a she. She's a bit too petite, though—I envisioned her being only a few inches shorter than her male counterpart—but otherwise, it's a great visual reference. :) I mean, geez, I still can hardly believe someone actually did some fan art for this thing.   
  
Anyways, thanks as always to everyone who sent in reviews; I really didn't mean that crack about quitting this. I was feeling really overworked at the time. In any case, I really appreciate your encouragement, and I do take to heart what you guys have to say. Well, on with the story... 

* * *

The Kakarotte Factor  
by [Echelon][1]  


* * *

  


* * *

Chapter Eight:  
The Prophet  


* * *

"This is insane," Celipa hissed. She was plodding grudgingly after the Saiyan at the lead of the line, patently ignoring the two strangers behind her. "Bardock won't tolerate any visitors. You _know_ that, Toma." 

"Bardock?" Shin queried with modulated mildness. "Is that the name of your commander?" 

Celipa huffed impatiently, as though the Supreme Kai were a very small child she were humoring. "Yes," she snapped, then turned back to her male companion. "I'm telling you, Toma. This is absolutely unacceptable. What makes you think that these two are any different from the others?" 

Kibito's pointed ears pricked up at the revelation. "There were others?" 

"Of course there were. Do you think you were the first?" Celipa shook her head at the hulking man's apparent naïveté. "You'd be surprised at the number of maggots here who'd sell their own children for the slightest bit of information from the commander." 

"What you mean, information?" Kibito demanded, and was supremely annoyed with himself for being unable to curtail his own inquisitiveness. 

Ahead of them, Toma lifted his broad shoulders. "This is Hell, my friend. And here in this place, the one thing we have so precious little of—besides everything else, that is—is the knowledge of anything that happens outside this place." 

Kibito still appeared nonplussed, but the Supreme Kai understood: the dead here could never be granted the satisfaction of watching the Living World pick up the pieces in the wake of their existences. This was Hell, after all, and no one here was supposed to be allowed any sort of closure. 

"If I may ask," Shin ventured diplomatically, "how did your commander come across this...skill of his?" He didn't remember Saiyans ever possessing particularly strong clairvoyant tendencies. 

"He says it was a Kanassan," Celipa replied. "On the day of his youngest son's birth. We just finished mopping up the place. It would be our second-to-last mission." 

Out of the corner of his eye, Shin saw Kibito tense at her narration. He really couldn't blame the taller Kai, however—the Kanassans had been gifted mystics, supposedly having been granted their telepathic powers via some unnamed element that resided within their planet. They had been a peaceful, proactive race, content on using their abilities mostly for mental healing and technological advancement. They had been extinct for decades now, but stories of their extrasensory civilization were still mentioned around the four quadrants of the universe. For Shin and Kibito to realize that they had been walking alongside the Kanassans' butchers all along was a harsh, but needed, reminder to both that the Saiyans, essential as their assistance was to their current dilemma, held little regard for other people's survival. 

"There was this Kanassan," Celipa continued, oblivious to the change in the two visitors' demeanors. "The last survivor. Guess he wanted to avenge his race or something, because the fish-faced fool thought he could take us all on. He actually had the balls to ambush our commander from behind—struck him on the back of his skull. We had no choice but to fry the bastard, of course. But before he died, he babbled something about how he'd given Bardock knowledge of the future. We didn't think of it much back then, but that was probably when it all started." 

Shin pushed down a sudden swell of anger brought on by a memory of the magnificent Kanassan Star Spire, and said, "What you said earlier—you say there were others who knew about your commander's ability. How?" 

"Damned if we know." Toma shrugged. "The other Saiyans believe him insane, anyway. But somehow there were people who found out. One of them was none other than the father of the great Frieza himself." 

Kibito stopped walking, but only for a moment: being the last in the line, the others didn't notice, and were liable to leave him behind if he remained stationary for long. "King Cold? King Cold came here?" 

Toma's lips quirked upwards at the mauve-skinned man's skepticism. "First he sent a couple of his subordinates to poke around. Of course, we sent them back having reacquainted them with their insides. That was when King Cold decided to pay us a visit himself. The father of Frieza prides himself on knowing everything that's worth knowing—as much as anyone can know anything in this place, anyway. Fed us some line about being here on behalf of his son, and that he had heard about our commander's...abilities. He asked us to take us to him. Actually, more like threatened." 

The Saiyan let the unfinished anecdote hang in the air until Shin felt obligated to prod him on: "And?" 

"And...I think we were the ones who got to be reacquainted with our insides that time." 

Toma chuckled loudly as though reliving a particularly fond memory, leaving Kibito to debate the average Saiyan's sanity levels. Celipa's nostrils flared slightly, whether in suppressed conviviality or indignation, neither Shin nor Kibito were sure. 

"I take it he didn't get to meet your commander?" Shin said, his words more perfunctory than anything. 

"Of course he didn't," shot back Celipa, tossing her head. Slivers of gold glinted in the weak light—she was wearing earrings, a rather incongruously feminine thing for a hard-edged Saiyan warrior, even a woman, to be sporting. "Do you really think we could be that accommodating after what his son did? Besides, we would rather watch our own planet die all over again than let that bastard turn the commander into one of his lapdogs. He roughed us up, tried to torture us into telling, but we kept our mouths shut. Didn't tell him a damn thing. Finally he gave up and left." 

"He wasn't the last, of course," Toma allowed, picking his way through a minor maze of stalagmites. "There were others, hailing from all over Hell. They all wanted to see the commander." 

"Because of his hallucina—" Kibito caught Celipa's warning glance and decided to rephrase. "Because of his visions?" 

"Yes," Celipa replied shortly. 

Shin was very careful to modulate his next question. "Do you really believe that? That your commander can see what happens outside of Hell?" 

The female Saiyan seemed incensed by the insinuation; she growled and sped up her stride. Toma's features took on an introspective look, but all he offered was a vague, "Maybe," and left it at that. 

From then on they journeyed in silence. Deeper into the cavern the clang and clamor of wretched souls were not as voluble; the atmosphere seemed highlighted by a sulfurous electric-blue glow, the source of which both Kibito and Shin were hard-pressed to locate. 

Just as Kibito's brain was beginning to roil with thoughts of impending ambush, the cave floor sloped dramatically downwards. Sprawled out low before them was a sweeping area wreathed in a faint miasma that almost concealed the figures milling about. 

Kibito tensed on behalf of himself and the Supreme Kai as two of the figures advanced toward them. They were, perhaps not surprisingly, Saiyans: they were both dressed in the now familiar uniform. The male on the left was a colossus with hair that receded spitefully from his forehead and scalp, leaving a ring of inky spikes around his ears and the back of his head, as well as a melancholy clump that hung across the skin above his naked brow like a hopeless rallying cry. The one on the right was also a male, slightly shorter, with oddly limp—for Saiyan standards, anyway—hair arranged into a bowl cut and a rotund frame that could not obscure the sinew underneath the rolls of fat. The two of them honed in on the trespassers with the usual Saiyan xenophobic accuracy, and proceeded to circle the trespassers with unsettling interest. 

"What's this, Celipa?" the corpulent one piped up, his tone unexpectedly bantering. "You picking up strays again?" 

The balding one nudged mockingly at the female's shoulder. "Don't you think they're rather a little too old for you to mother?" 

Celipa shut them up by burying an elbow into their respective kidneys, deep enough so that the joints were no longer visible. Shin and Kibito winced in involuntary sympathy, but Toma guffawed as though this were a regular occurrence. 

"Morons," Celipa hissed as her two victims clutched at their sides. "First of all, I do _not_ have a habit of picking up anyone who looks like they need 'mothering.' And second of all, bringing them here was Toma's idea, not mine." 

The two injured Saiyans stared inquiringly at Toma, whose only response was to scratch lazily at the back of his neck with his index finger. 

"Aw, Toma, just what the hell were you thinking?" the podgy Saiyan demanded. "You led 'em straight to the commander." 

"Yeah, and he's not exactly in the mood to be receiving visitors," seconded his companion. 

Kibito was almost relieved by their inhospitality; if they weren't welcome here, then there was no reason he and the Supreme Kai should linger about here any longer. They could leave this sector graciously, and then they could go back up to the less hazardous levels where there were no ill-mannered, planet-decimating delinquents who could mouth off to the Supreme Kai, and then they could see King Yema about the unaccounted-for inmates, and once that was done, they could get out of this damned place and back into the Upperworld where they so rightly belonged... 

"Very well," mumbled Kibito, making sure not to appear too enthusiastic as he prepared to go back the way they had came. "I can see that we're not wanted here, so we'll just..." 

But Shin, having survived an ungodly amount of one-on-one interactions with Cimmerian celebrities the likes of Cell and Frieza and King Cold, was no longer the shrinking violet he had been during the beginning of this particular sojourn. "We don't mean to cause you any inconvenience," he interjected, and Kibito had to do a reluctant 180-degree spin on his heel, biting the inside of his cheek to keep himself from uttering a groan of disappointment. 

The thickset Saiyan appraised the two strangers from head to toe, smoothing the ends of his thin, licorice-like mustache as he did so. "Well, you got that right. You guys don't even look like you'd be able to cause us any kind of real inconvenience." 

"Are you here to here to bring us back?" the balding one demanded abruptly. He stalked over toward the two intruders, his hairless brows beetling in suspicion. "If you are, I'm afraid to have to inform you gentlemen that you are going to have to drag us back by force. We are not leaving our commander." 

"Relax, Totepo," Toma finally spoke up in Shin's and Kibito's defense. He unfolded his arms, one corner of his lips angling subtly upward. "They're not in league with the ogres. Actually, I don't think they're even in league with anyone in this place." 

Totepo drew back a little, but he continued to eye the Supreme Kai and his assistant with unrelenting suspicion. "How certain are you on that, Toma?" he challenged. "Are you forgetting the kinds of people who've been sniffing around here for the commander?" 

His comrade chimed in. "Yeah. It ain't even safe for any one who looks like him. I mean, you seen Turles around lately? He looks like he wishes he were dead, the way they've been beating up on him. Just because the guy happens to look almost exactly like Bardock." 

"And that green-skinned creature that was knocking here around some time ago," Celipa chimed in, no doubt gratified that she finally had someone on her side. "The one with that horrible needle on the end of his tail. Remember? He nearly broke Pamboukin's jaw with his pinky finger. His _pinky finger_, damn it." 

The corpulent Saiyan stroked his jowls as though contemplating what it would be like to have a shattered mandible. 

"He wasn't looking for Bardock," Toma reminded them. "He said he wanted to speak to the father of someone called Son Goku." 

It was Shin and Kibito's turn to trade glances, but before either of them could deliberate on the merits of revealing what they knew, yet another Saiyan walked out from the penumbra. 

"Well, he was on the right track." 

The newcomer was a hulking male wearing a sleeveless, barelegged version of the Saiyan armor. His features were lean, his nose bladelike, and he possessed a truly impressive mane of jet-black locks that extended past his sinewy thighs. His forehead was high, narrowing into a widow's peak that was less pronounced than the Saiyan king's. 

" 'Son Goku' is the Earthling name Kakarrot goes by nowadays," he told the other Saiyans, who then fell silent as they assimilated this revelation. The longhaired man turned on the two trespassers, his brows drawing steeply downwards like heavy black inverse checkmarks perched over the belligerent slivers of his eyes. "And who are you?" he growled. "Have you come looking for my father because you can't get your hands on my infamous little brother?" 

Kibito edged reflexively in front of the Supreme Kai, but Shin sidled around him and leveled his composed gaze with the rankled Saiyan's. 

"You said," he began, "Son Goku is your brother?" 

"Ah, so you do know the little traitor." The Saiyan sneered malignantly down at him. "What do you want with Kakarrot this time? No, wait, let me guess—it's revenge. He crossed you in some way and now you want to pay him back by going after Father. That's the way it always is with the esteemed guests in this place." 

"We've met your brother, that's true," Shin admitted steadfastly, "but we aren't here on a misplaced mission of revenge against your father. We are merely here to speak to him." 

His earnest declaration was met by a round of stares from the Saiyans, some of them curious, all of them outright disbelieving. 

"You've met Kakarrot?" Celipa wanted to know. 

Toma, oddly enough, was less convinced than she. "That's not possible. Kakarrot was just a baby when..." He trailed off, and Totepo took up for him. 

"Don't fall for it. He's lying," fumed the balding Saiyan. 

Kibito was tremendously offended in behalf of his master. "How dare you insinuate that! The Supreme Kai never lies!" he roared. 

There was a brief pause as the Saiyans regarded him frostily, but it was broken as Pamboukin offered, suddenly: "I just remembered...there was a rumor. I think...it started after that green-skinned psycho arrived here. They said that Kakarrot had been killed. That he was dead." 

Celipa glanced at him in irritation. "I thought we agreed," she retorted, her words clipped and curt. "Kakarrot can't be dead. If he were, we would've seen him around here, and we haven't." 

"No, you wouldn't have," Shin agreed before he could stop himself. "He went to Heaven." 

This time the lull that ensued was longer as the Saiyans tried to digest the fairly implausible idea of a Saiyan actually ending up in Heaven. 

But the longhaired man laughed, the noise brusque and cutting. "So Kakarrot got to go to Heaven, eh? It figures. Little brother always was a bleeding-heart do-gooder. His Earthling upbringing made him too soft." 

"If that's so, Raditz, then how come the last time you tussled with your baby brother, you were the one who ended up being sent permanently here to the Otherworld?" 

The Saiyans seemed only mildly surprised at the new speaker's arrival, but Shin and Kibito were rendered speechless. 

Because, barring the Saiyan uniform, the sienna complexion, the angular-edged eyes, the scar imprinted on his left cheek, and the crimson band knotted around his forehead, the man was the splitting image of the Saiyan they knew as Son Goku. 

"Bardock!" Pamboukin exclaimed as the one called Raditz scowled unhappily at his boots. 

"You're supposed to be meditating," reprimanded Celipa, but there was no real bite in it. 

Bardock swept his flinty gaze over the knot of Saiyans and let it alight, finally, on the two strangers. 

"I knew you would come," he informed them, and there was a flare of something incomprehensibly close to recognition in his sloe-black eyes. "I was waiting." 

* * *

With Goku securely ensconced inside one of _Valencia's Secret_'s fitting rooms, Chi-Chi and Bulma were free to concentrate on other things, such as raiding the store for an exorbitant array of undergarments for their new victim to try on. They loitered about in front of her stall, their arms heaped with their frilly selections, merrily prattling away and loftily ignoring the abnormal amount of grunts and thumps issuing from the other side of the dressing room door. 

"Panties, Goku," Bulma sang, sorting through a variety of the undergarments in question. "Don't forget—you're going to need panties." 

"I'm not going to wear any panties," Goku announced. An unsuspecting young man strolling by the dressing room area came within earshot of her proclamation and promptly crashed into a tastefully set-up lingerie display. 

"Oh, come on!" scoffed Bulma, adopting her customary argumentative stance as she prepared to have words with the closed stall door. "What're you going to wear? Your stinky old briefs?" 

"No," Goku insisted stubbornly. "I have my boxers." 

"Boxers—your _boxers_?" Bulma held a hand to her heart as though to stave off a coronary. "Boxers are for guys, Goku. Big, beef-eating, manly...guys." 

Goku peered defiantly over the top of the stall door, her sneakers hovering some inches off of the floor. "I _am_ a guy!" 

Heads popped out of the surrounding stalls like daises after a spring shower, their expressions registering faint alarm. The young man outside did a wobbly pivot on his heels and walked straight into the arms of a bustier-clad mannequin. 

"Hell-_ooo_." Bulma wriggled one end of a heart-patterned g-string at the younger woman. "Do you have a mirror in there? Have you even looked in it? Do you look like the kind of person who should be wearing boxers? No, of course you don't," she declared as Goku opened her mouth to say otherwise. "So here." She chucked a piece of filmy cloth over the stall with the proficiency of one accustomed to flinging unmentionables. "Try this on." 

Goku shot her the most hangdog expression she could muster, which was a bit difficult, admittedly, with a striped blue-and-white pair of French-cut panties dangling from the right side of her head. From the look on Bulma's face, though, Goku knew she had no hope. Grudgingly, she divested her hair of the underwear and retreated back into the privacy of her changing room. 

"Good girl," Bulma cooed approvingly, and various heads withdrew back to their stalls amidst sympathetic murmurs about current gender-related social pressures and their devastating impacts on poor innocent young women. Outside the unfortunate red-faced young man tried fruitlessly to salvage the ruined display and mannequin despite Bento's dismayed protests, and Chi-Chi and Bulma recommenced their search for underwear appropriate for the newly gender-swapped. 

At least, Chi-Chi was. 

"Oooh, now this is nice," Bulma commented, admiring a semi-transparent burgundy-colored teddy. She tossed it enthusiastically over the stall door. "Here, Goku, try on this one!" 

Goku made a long-suffering groan from the other side, while Chi-Chi goggled at the blue-haired woman. 

"Bulma, did you just give my husband a teddy?" she asked incredulously. 

Her friend wiggled her eyebrows at her. "Why, yes, I think I just did." 

"But it's a _teddy_." Chi-Chi looked absolutely scandalized. "What's she going to need it for?" 

"How should I know?" Bulma sifted through an avalanche of undergarments and held up a princess-seamed chemise for further scrutiny. "Besides, as far as I'm concerned, I'm doing Goku a favor. With that body of hers, pulling that teddy off should be a breeze." 

Chi-Chi uttered an inarticulate burbling sound. "Whu—what—listen to yourself! You're starting to sound like that perverted clerk who wanted to showcase my husband's chest! I mean, it was bad enough that we used Goku like a dress-up doll, but buying her fancy underwear that no one's going to ever going to see is kind of going overboard, isn't it?" 

"Hey, don't hate me just because I happen to be feeling charitable about the whole situation," Bulma retorted, exchanging the chemise for a checkered red-and-white picnic-themed thong. "You know, you could look at it from a positive point of view. I mean, I can tell you right now with all honesty that of all the people I know, you're the one who's got the prettiest husband." 

Bulma sniggered abundantly at her own words, but Chi-Chi was far from reassured by her attempt at consolation. "Uh, right. That's real comforting, Bulma," she muttered, agitatedly snapping the strap of a blue-black satin bra. 

The other woman regarded her peculiarly. "What's with you, anyway? You're being really testy today. Testier than usual, anyway." She put down the thong, her jovial air all but fading. "This's really bothering you, isn't it? The whole change thing." 

"No," Chi-Chi replied without much conviction. She studied the periwinkle camisole in her hand with superfluous concentration before admitting haltingly, "Well...I suppose I _am_ having trouble with all this. I mean...Goku just came back to me. Everything was supposed to be going happily ever after. But then...this happens." She slapped the camisole back down into the silky pile. "Just when I think everything's going back to what we were like before, my husband turns into a woman." 

"Chi-Chi, it's just temporary," Bulma reminded her, just before she recalled her earlier phone conversation with her father. "Well," she amended to herself, "at least, if my dad's wrong, it ought to be." 

"What?" 

"Uh, nothing, nothing." Bulma pushed the thought out of her mind and plastered an appeasing expression on her face for Chi-Chi's benefit. "Hey, listen, Goku told us that we're just going to have to wait until that Shin guy came back and figured out what happened. So don't work yourself up over this. You know, you're starting to sound almost...well..." 

"...insecure?" Chi-Chi finished for her. She tried to laugh, but what came out did not even sound like a reasonable facsimile. "Well...I suppose I am, at that." Her fingers began to pluck idly at the elastic fastenings of a corselette. "I mean, like you said...Goku's...well, look at her. And I know it's crazy, but I keep thinking...why would my husband want to look at me when she can look that...that perfect Playboy-bunny body of hers anytime she wants?" 

Bulma patted the other woman's shoulder, her expression fluctuating between being aghast and comforting. "Er, Chi Chi...that's his..._her _body. Besides, that'd be...really creepy. Goku isn't that kind of person. You know that." 

As though in confirmation, the changing room door shuddered and acquired a concave tilt: another casualty of Son Goku's ongoing quest to conquer the intricacies of female undergarments. The two women raised their heads, briefly distracted, then lowered them again to resume their discussion. 

"See?" Bulma said over the sounds of grumbling and muffled banging. "Does that sound like someone who's actually enjoying her new body?" 

Chi-Chi cringed at the other woman's terminology, but there was no contesting her logic. "I guess." She listened as something stretchy ricocheted inside the stall, followed by Goku's answering muted exclamations about female underwear being more complex than death duels over exploding planets. "Oh, Bulma—you're absolutely right. I don't know what came over me." 

"Hey, now—don't beat yourself up. We all get that way now and then. Even me." Bulma was feeling ridiculously philanthropic today; she picked up a sample of _Valencia's Secret_'s best selling new apparel—an elaborate rose-patterned push-up bra with inflatable pads—and began to toy with the little control pumps. "Once I got swayed by the allure of a C-cup." 

Chi-Chi stared at her, unsure whether to be thrilled or appalled. "You mean...Bulma! You mean, you..." She indicated the blue-haired woman's chest with quick, fluttery movements. "You—" 

"Got a boob job?" Bulma completed for her, her grin wry and utterly unabashed. "Well, of course I did. You think it's easy for these babies to stand at attention at my age and after one kid? Besides, I had a few thousand zeni lying around and I thought, what the hell? I was feeling bloated and depressed and Trunks was going through the terrible twos and his father was more interested in training than me, so..." She puffed out her chest. "Viola. They're actually quite impressive, if I do say so myself." 

Chi-Chi eyed the body parts in question as though they were a pair of high-risk combustibles. "Uh, right. Um...didn't it hurt?" 

"What? Hell, no! It was perfectly painless—well, not perfectly; I was sore for a week, but I think it was worth it. Don't you think so?" 

"Er...well..." 

"Here—you can get a better look if you lean forward. See? They look totally natural, don't they?" 

Just then Bento stumbled into the changing room area, his arms loaded with the very latest in intimate fashions. He nearly tripped at the sight of the bun-haired brunette leaning in close to inspect a consenting Ms. Briefs's assets. He dropped his bundle, squeaked out something strangled and doubtlessly embarrassing, then staggered out in a daze. 

Chi-Chi and Bulma watched him leave, then shook their heads at each other. 

"He usually doesn't act this weird," Bulma remarked, somehow feeling compelled to act on Bento's defense. 

"He wasn't acting weird. He was being perverted." Chi-Chi let out a sniff and went over to ransack the new heap of underwear. "Did you see the way he was ogling my Goku the entire time she was in here?" 

"Maybe he was looking at her hair," her friend pointed out equably. "All that crazy hair...I mean, didn't you look twice at Goku's hairstyle the first time you met him?" 

Chi-Chi tried to cobble up the memory, but the decades had significantly eroded the details. Not surprisingly, the realization did nothing to boost her spirits. "No, I—I don't..." 

As it was, the sounds of indoor destruction was already a familiar symphony to both women's ears, but it still took them all of a semi-second to process that it was issuing from inside _Valencia's Secret._

"What the..." Bulma reached out to steady the mound of lingerie as the store shivered, the silk-draped walls glimmering with the aftershocks. Panicked half-dressed patrons poured out of the dressing stalls, their relative modesty forgotten in the face of impending danger. 

From somewhere inside the boutique came a chorus of cries from the clientele—Bento's spooked-schoolgirl scream the most strident among them—which subsided to a ripple of jumbled, anxious mutterings just before a caped, broad-shouldered form charged into the dressing room area. 

"Piccolo?" Chi-Chi gasped, unconsciously holding out a corselette in front of her like a gossamer talisman to ward off evil. 

"You _do_ know this's a dressing room, right?" asked Bulma, her hands on her hips, an isle of equanimity in the sea of alarmed, scuttling females. 

Piccolo ignored the ruckus he was causing and barged straight into Goku's changing stall, snapping the lock as though it were a piece of celery. "Goku! If you're done playing dress-up, you and I are going to—_what in the name of Dende are you wearing_?" 

The stall door flew open as Piccolo went lurching backward and fell unceremoniously on his behind. Had he been human his complexion would've been markedly green, but since it already was, his face was instead a striking shade of russet. 

Goku poked her head out of the dressing room to stare at him. Her shoulders were bare. "It's a bra, Piccolo," she told him pointedly. She didn't appear embarrassed at all—just defensive. 

Piccolo picked himself up from the floor. The whites of his eyes stood out prominently against the verdant hue of his skin as he alternated his gaze between the half-dressed Saiyan and the two women. "What the _hell _have you done to Goku?" he demanded. 

Bulma gave an affronted sniff. "What do you mean, what did we do to Goku? You make it sound like we corrupted her or something." 

"She looks like a _woman_," Piccolo growled, as though this explained everything. 

"Well, duh—maybe that's because she _is_." The blue-haired woman glanced exasperatedly toward the few remaining dumbstruck patrons who stood paralyzed along the dressing room corridor. "I mean, am I the only one who seems to be picking up on that essential little detail?" 

"Don't talk to me as though I'm stupid!" retorted the Namek. "Of course I realize that! It's just that...that..." 

"That what?" asked Goku, a frown nicking her brows. 

"Never mind." Piccolo clamped his hand over one side of his face like a makeshift eye-patch. As far as females went, his experience with them was sorely limited; all he knew about the so-called fairer sex was that they talked, they generally didn't like fighting, and though they were frailer than the males, they possessed this mysterious ability to methodically divest them of their spines as well as any sort of rational thought. The idea that Son Goku could now belong to their phylum was immensely harrowing to the Namek. "Get dressed, Goku. We are going to turn you back to normal." 

"_What_?" Chi-Chi snapped out of her flabbergasted daze and leaped to her feet. "How?" 

"We are going to use the dragonballs." At Goku's bemused look, he informed her sternly, "No, Goku, we can no longer wait for the Supreme Kai to return to us with the information we need. We are going to have to resolve this ourselves." 

Chi-Chi clapped her hands, utterly overjoyed. "The dragonballs! Of course! They should easily turn her back. Why didn't we think of that before—heck, why didn't _I _think of that?" 

"Ex-cuse me!" exclaimed Bulma, rolling up her palm out in a dramatic "hold-it" gesture. "We are _shopping_ here. You just don't interrupt women while they're shopping—especially when they're shopping for something as essential as underwear!" 

Piccolo gawped. This was yet another of the many things the former Guardian of Earth could not grasp about females—never mind the fact that the world was in danger of ending: there were other more important priorities, like schoolwork, or buying tiny, frilly pieces of fabric no one ever got to see because they had to be worn underneath their clothes. 

"It's okay, Bulma," Goku said hurriedly, withdrawing her head back into her stall. "I think I got all I need." 

Bulma was disheartened. "But you haven't even tried the rest of the stuff here we picked out for you," she argued, indicating the mounds of underwear Bento had very accommodatingly carted in. 

"Oh, I'm sure they all fit. You can, um, pick out anything you want. You got great fashion sense, right?" There was a high-speed rustling sound as Goku got dressed in record time. The stall door swung open and she dashed out, pulling her top down over her stomach. "Let's go, Piccolo." 

"Good," Piccolo muttered, trying not to stare at the young woman's ensemble: ruffled-front teal tank top and bleached too-short jeans. He turned on his heel to exit, but Chi-Chi didn't give him the chance. 

"Hold on a minute," the brunette ordered, trotting up toward him. "You're about to drag my Goku into some life-or-death battle, aren't you? Well, shame on you! She can't be involved in some battle, especially in her condition!" 

Goku made a face. "My 'condition'? Aw, Chi-Chi," she complained. "You make it sound like I got a disease or something." 

Piccolo stopped, his back to them. "Goku and I are merely going to go search for the last dragonball," he stated, failing miserably to suppress the cantankerous note in his voice. "And if the others have not yet located the other six balls, then Goku is going to have to go through some re-training first." 

"Re-training? You're actually going to make her _fight_?" Chi-Chi called after the departing Namek. She followed him out into the store, conveniently ignoring the Piccolo-sized hole on the ceiling and the patrons scattered here and there who were cowering behind various underwear racks and displays. "You better not be rough with her if you know what's good for you!" 

Piccolo bared his teeth at her like a carnivore showing off its bridgework. "You forget who you're talking to. I'm _always_ rough with her." 

From somewhere in the background came the sounds of more than one person reacting to this bit of torridness. 

"He's right on that count. He's always rough on me." Goku grinned sheepishly at her fretting wife. "Don't worry, Chi-Chi! I'll be back soon," she promised, hurrying past her to join the Namek. 

"Oh, all right," Chi-Chi relented, realizing with a surge of elation that when Goku returned, perhaps she would be a he again. Until then, however, it was still up to her to ensure her husband's modesty. "Hey, you better be wearing a bra, mister!" 

For a quarter-second Chi-Chi had the disconcerting sensation that Goku was going to pull up her shirt right there in the middle of the store, but her spouse just tugged her neckline down over her left shoulder to display a delicate peach-colored bra strap. 

"Yup!" she replied cheerfully, then grasped Piccolo's elbow. "All right, Piccolo, let's jet." 

"Wait," Chi-Chi began. "Goku, you've got your bra on—" 

It was too late; Goku had already pressed her index and middle fingers to her forehead, and an eye-blink later she and Piccolo were no longer inside _Valencia's Secret_. 

"—inside-out," Chi-Chi finished uselessly. She contemplated the empty space where her husband and the Namek had once occupied, then shook her head and turned around. 

Bulma was emerging from the dressing room section, a revealing red and black bra-and-panties combo in her hand and a devious glint in her eye. 

At Chi-Chi's puzzled glance, the blue haired woman explained coyly, "Well, Goku _did_ say that I could pick out anything I wanted for her, right?" 

From his hiding place behind the _Valencia's Secret _counter, Bento longingly eyeballed the proffered underwear and cursed his particular brand of kismet for introducing him to a crazy-haired, gender-confused seraph with an eye for masochistic green men and temperamental bun-haired housewives. 

* * *

It was funny how, even while his larynx was being methodically crushed in his murderer's death-grip, all Nappa could think about was how much his prince had grown: the Vegeta he had gazed down at the final seconds of his previous life had been in his early thirties—by Saiyan standards, just barely more than a teenager. 

In contrast, the Vegeta staring at him now had grown well into his adulthood—his features were sharper, more angular, his eyes harder and far more penetrating. His frame, though muscular enough before, had filled out even more: his neck was a trunk of ropy tendons, his exposed arms about the same girth as the general's despite the former's much shorter stature—and in spite of himself, Nappa felt a trickle of the old intimidation. 

"You're supposed to be dead," Vegeta remarked casually, as though the dead returning to life was nothing new. Which, really, it wasn't. "Did someone wish you back with the dragonballs?" 

Nappa's voice barely made it out of his compressed throat. "Obviously...not you...eh, Vegeta...?" 

"Hey, he knows your name!" 

The friction in the air was partially defused as the two of them turned their stares on their forgotten audience. The purple-haired boy was vacillating his glance between them, his countenance perplexed, while the Kakarrot-child hung back and gnawed on his knuckle, regarding the two adults with thoughtful eyes. 

Vegeta made a deeply displeased sound. "You brats go back home. There's nothing more to see here." 

The dark-haired child pulled his tiny fist from his mouth. "But _we _found him!" he protested. 

"And he knew your name!" the purple-haired youngster put in. He swung his pale gaze toward Nappa. "How'd you know my father's name?" 

Nappa had actually been doing fine for someone who was being progressively suffocated, but the purple-haired boy's words hit him with a wave of acute vertigo. He felt faint, almost ill, as his mind backpedaled in an effort to grasp just what the child had blurted out. 

_Father...?_ __

No, that couldn't be possible. The prince would never degrade himself by mating with a frail Earthling woman, much less produce something as inherently abhorrent as a hybrid child. It went against everything the prince stood for—everything the mighty Saiyan race stood for. Kakarrot might have been corrupted enough by this place to have voluntarily committed such an offense, but not the prince. Never the prince. 

Besides, Nappa reasoned frantically to himself, the boy had limp pastel hair and blue eyes; anyone could see that the brat was human. Perhaps Vegeta had adopted him—though Nappa couldn't imagine for the life of him why the prince would agree to do such a thing—or perhaps the brat had been rattled one time too many and had mistaken the prince for his father... 

"Trunks," the prince commanded through clenched teeth, "take Goten with you and go home." 

The purple-haired youngster's eyes widened—his father rarely deviated from his liberal use of the word "brat" to refer to him and Goten—but he was his mother's son, too, and he could be every bit as obstinate as she was. "But, Dad," he argued, "who is he? How'd you guys know each other? And why's he dressed so funny? And what—" 

A single heated glance from his father put an end to his jabbering. The child dithered, clearly loath to back down. In his hesitation he tossed one last glare at Nappa, who was suddenly struck by the uncanny similitude between the boy's features and Vegeta's. 

"Go _home_," the prince enunciated. It was clear enough to all that this was the last time he was going to say it. 

"All right, all right. Have it your way." The boy huffed and began to stomp off, yanking the younger child's shirtsleeve as he passed him. "C'mon, Goten. They want us to buzz off." 

Goten pouted as he was carted off by his friend. "But we didn't even get to finish play-fighting with him!" 

"This isn't over," Trunks promised him in a stage whisper. "We'll just let them have their little secret talk or whatever and then we'll come back and find out what the heck's going on." 

They took to the air, shooting parting glances over their shoulders at the standoff between the two adults. 

Vegeta waited until he was sure that the children's ki were at least several miles off before he turned his attention back to his hapless former cohort. Nappa was staring at him, the blue veins visible at the edges of his bulging eyeballs, his expression frozen in a mishmash of emotions: shock, dismay, anger, disgust. 

"That was your brat," he rasped. "The...fair-haired one. He's yours." 

Vegeta surveyed him for a too-long moment, then abruptly released his grip on his former comrade's throat. "So what if he is, Nappa?" he asked, his tone deceptively mild. "What if the brat is mine?" 

Nappa tumbled to the ground, hacking. He lifted his head upwards, blinking rapidly to clear his wobbly vision. 

For the first time he became aware of the fact that, aside from the boots, the prince was no longer wearing his Saiyan fighting attire. Instead he was wearing a dark blue bodysuit that looked like it was made of some spindly Earthling fibers. There was no sign of his tail. 

The prince could have passed for an Earthling, Nappa realized, his nausea mounting. He no longer wore Saiyan clothes, no longer had his tail. He had mated with Earthling scum and had sired a half-breed child. He had ended up taking the same road as that lowborn traitor Kakarrot. 

What the hell had happened? the general wondered in mounting hysteria. How many years had passed since he had gone? Ten? Twenty? It had to have been a considerable amount, judging from the frightening turnaround the prince had undergone—he was masquerading on Earth as one of these soft-skinned humans! 

Such a blasphemous notion refused to process through Nappa's brain. He had to be dreaming; perhaps he was still in Hell, immersed within one of his habitual nightmares... 

The prince's voice cut short his reverie. "You know, Nappa, I really don't like the way you're looking at me." 

There was a definite tinge of warning in the prince's inflection; common sense dictated that the prudent thing for the general to do was to avert his gaze from the shorter Saiyan and say nothing. 

But then again, no one had ever accused Nappa of being prudent. 

"You've become...one of them," he managed to choke out, his words dripping with revulsion. "You—the mighty prince of the Saiyan race...reduced to...to...passing yourself off as one of these feeble Earthlings." 

He almost braced himself for an incoming Galic Gun, but Vegeta remained impervious, motionless, his slitted gaze fixed on something that the general could not see. 

Nappa lurched to his feet, struggling to suppress the nausea spiraling up inside of him. Ever since he had woken up on this orbiting ball of dirt, he'd been eagerly anticipating the shocked look on the prince's face once he found out that the general he'd once put to death had come back to life and was itching to settle the score. Instead Vegeta seemed relatively unfazed by his resurrection, and Nappa was the one reeling from everything he'd discovered: flying children, the Kakarrot-child, the prince's hybrid son, the prince's rebuffing of his Saiyan roots and his willingness to walk amongst these pathetic humans... 

"Really, Nappa." The prince unfolded his arms. "I'm disappointed. All those years you've had to yourself, and you still haven't managed to grow yourself a new set of brain cells." 

The general sputtered; the prince had always had a way of reducing him into the stereotypical dim-witted musclehead. "Wh-what?" 

Vegeta spared him a contemptuous look, as though the answer were painfully obvious. "Even the weakest of Kakarrot's feeble friends would never mistake me for a puny Earthling." 

Nappa wasn't frightened—in fact, he was feeling bolder than he had ever been in a long time. After all, he had spent his internment in a place where every minute had the span of an eternity, ramming heads with his fellow elite Saiyans and an ever-changing roster of high-level foes. None of the other Saiyans had known how the great general Nappa had met his end; more likely than not they had chalked it up to one of Frieza's over-powered goons, and Nappa had never bothered to correct them. His increased thirst for power had been surprising even to his old comrades who'd known him back when there had been a planet Vegeta. Perhaps he had, unconsciously, been preparing himself for a reprisal he knew would never come. 

The Vegeta of the past might have been younger and brasher, but his skills had been fed on a steady diet of planet raids and bloody battles with a host of intergalactic would-be defenders. This Vegeta, though older, had been relegated to Earth, a planet populated with beings with power levels that barely qualified in the double digits, and had apparently spent the last decade or so being domesticated by an Earthling mate and a crossbreed son. The hazardous, backbreaking, exhilarating days of planet purges were over; the prince had evidently left them behind for a negligent, lackluster Earthling existence. 

"You've forgotten yourself, Vegeta," the general spat. "You've become _soft_." 

Eager to test out this particular theory, he decided to start off the skirmish with a hard right. 

Vegeta didn't dodge, but he didn't let the punch connect, either. 

Nappa screamed as his ulna and radius bent in ways they were never meant to bend. 

The prince stared coolly at the general over the twisted crook of his massive arm. He held the latter's wrist fast in one hand, trapping the connected limb in an excruciating, corkscrewed angle. 

"Still think I'm soft, Nappa?" 

The pain was worse than anything Nappa had ever felt in Hell—worse than the time the time that Massopian freak had fractured a disk in his spinal cord (Nappa had snapped both his legs some minutes afterward in retribution). He could barely align his thought processes over the agony stampeding through his shoulder joint and upper-limb ligaments. His attempts to wrench out of the prince's grip only resulted in additional arrows of fire shooting across his already tortured nerves. 

Vegeta increased the pressure on the arm—just for good measure—and then, just as abruptly as he'd executed the move, released his hold. Nappa stumbled back, holding the burning arm away from him like a bird cradling a broken wing. 

"To tell you the truth, I think you're the one who's forgotten yourself," Vegeta said. He had not bothered to drop his own arm even after he had let Nappa go, and it remained up in the air, stretched out before him like an afterthought. "It seems you've forgotten how to conduct yourself before your prince." 

"Forgotten? I've forgotten?" Nappa's shoulders heaved as he gawked at the shorter Saiyan. "You _killed_ me, Vegeta! Why? I was your guardian! I raised you from when you were ten years old! I would have _died _for you!" 

"You were a _disgrace_!" Vegeta roared, his voice easily drowning out Nappa's yelling. He finally let his arm drop. "We came to this lowlife planet to show its inhabitants the futility of opposing us, but you turned out to be an embarrassment to me, to the entire Saiyan race, the moment you let a third-class Earth-raised Saiyan defeat you, and you _dare_ stand there and accuse me of turning my back on my people?" 

Nappa gestured at him with his unhurt arm. "Wh-why not? Look at you! You no longer have your tail! You've sired an abomination—a half-breed child! You've...you've—" 

The rest of his litany perished in his throat: for a brief but unsettling second, he thought he saw his prince's obsidian eyes flash green. 

"You have no idea what I've been through these past years," the prince said, and Nappa felt a chill snake through his spine; he had heard Vegeta utilize that voice only once, just before the latter had tossed him and his broken back into the sky and blasted him into non-existence. "No idea at all." 

It was only then that it occurred to Nappa that a lifetime might have passed since his impromptu jaunt to the Underworld. The prince was bereft of a planet, a race, and a dominion. There was nothing Saiyan left in the universe to remind him of his identity, nothing but... 

"Where is Kakarrot?" 

Vegeta stiffened almost imperceptibly, and Nappa realized that perhaps he wasn't the only Saiyan still holding a grudge against the third-class. 

"That was his son, wasn't it? The little one with your own brat. He couldn't have been the one I fought with. Which means...Kakarrot is still alive. You didn't kill him." 

The prince glared into the distance. The miniscule twitch at the upper corner of his sneer was the only sign that he was still listening. 

"Why didn't you kill him?" Nappa pressed on, his voice rising. "Didn't you say he was a traitor to the Saiyan race? Didn't you say we didn't need him to help us fight Frieza after all, that he would just be an obstacle to getting the dragonballs? Why is he still _alive_?" 

Vegeta spoke at last, but it wasn't to answer the other Saiyan's frustrated queries. "Be careful, Nappa," he cautioned, his tone far too composed. "I killed you once. I can easily do it again." 

Nappa flinched deeply. "You wouldn't...you can't..." 

"Can't I?" The prince swept a critical eye over the general's split lip, the bruises on his arm, the crack winding across his uniform's chest plate, and the soot dusting his front—the most visible remnant of his deflected ki-attack. "If Kakarrot's little brat could do that to you, what makes you think that I wouldn't be able to do much worse?" 

"I..." Nappa racked his overtaxed brain for an explanation. It had to have been a trick; the brat was half-_human_. A pureblooded Saiyan child would not have been able to repel that blast. Hell, even a full-grown Saiyan couldn't have blocked it without getting seriously injured. 

He was still groping for a rejoinder when Vegeta was suddenly standing in front of him, his stance openly confrontational. "Why have you returned, Nappa? Surely you're here to do something other than annoy me with all these useless questions. Who brought you back? _Why are you here_?" 

It was all too much to take in—the two brats' manhandling of him, Vegeta's seeming defection, his own sudden manifest weakness in comparison to all of them—that Nappa could do nothing but stutter. "I—I don't know. I was...all I remember was waking up in a field...I didn't...didn't even know I was on Earth, or that I was even alive, until he told me that—" 

"He?" interrupted Vegeta. 

"There was...another Saiyan with me," the general recalled haltingly, and watched as his prince's eyes widened. 

"Another Saiyan? Who?" 

"I didn't get his name." 

Vegeta did not look at all thrilled, to say the least. "You didn't get his name?" 

"He was just a lowly second-class," protested Nappa, as though this were an incontestable excuse. "No one important." 

"No one important?" Vegeta growled in disbelief. "You return from the dead with another Saiyan, and you did not even bother to find out who he was?" 

Nappa blinked; the prince was certainly getting riled up over the matter. Personally, he couldn't see what the big deal was—it had taken more than twenty years for them to ascertain Kakarrot's existence after the destruction of planet Vegeta, so it couldn't be that that far-fetched if another survivor had been located, right? "I—I had to leave him. The man was insane. He kept babbling about how we had to keep a low profile. Even tried to keep me from finding you. He said something about—I don't know—the other Saiyans and our numbers, something about how I wasn't going to be the only one coming back..." 

Vegeta had gone very still. "This Saiyan," he said. "Do you remember how he looked?" 

"How he looked...? Ah...stocky. Dark-skinned. Had these funny-looking sideburns on his face. Oh, and he also had this scar over his right eye, sealed it shut..." 

Nappa nearly went tumbling head-over-heels as Vegeta rocketed into the air in a burst of power that left caused the nearest rock formations to quake. Once in the sky, the prince did a swift semi-circle, then glanced down at the staggered general. 

"Nappa!" he barked. "Tell me where you last saw him." 

Caught off-guard, the general completely forgot his own rancor against the prince as his instinctual loyalty to the royal bloodline resurfaced with a vengeance. "Y-yes—I was flying southeast...he should be northwest of here—" 

Vegeta produced an unnecessarily loud but standard expletive, then whirled around and shot off in the direction indicated. 

By the time Nappa realized his mistake, the prince's form had receded to a black dot barely visible against the brightness of the sky. The general was suitably irked. 

"W-wait! Vegeta, where d'you think you're going? We're not done here! _Vegeta_!" 

His shout echoed across the ravine, bouncing off the cliff walls and flushing out a variety of aerial fauna, but it was, predictably, in vain: Vegeta was well out of hearing range, his ki trail tinted an odd gold. 

Nappa bellowed out something raw and wordless, and whirled around blindly for something to smash his fist into. His torso was still raw from its earlier tribulations, a patent reminder that he was, indeed, alive—and that everything he had once deemed immutable had just been turned upside-down. 

"Hey, pipe down. What're you yelling about?" 

The general spun toward the voice, almost giddy to have someone within striking range, and only barely managed to rein in his destructive reflexes as he beheld the two tiny forms staring up at him. 

"You really need to learn to control your anger there, pal," the purple-haired boy—Vegeta's _son_, Nappa thought, feeling his stomach churn—told him. "We were trying to eavesdrop, you know, but if Dad caught us we'd be in a world of hurt." 

The other boy—Kakarrot's second brat—flicked his eyes skyward. "Hey, where'd Vegeta go?" 

Nappa followed his gaze, mystified: the ki-trail had long evaporated, but the child seemed to know exactly which route the prince had taken. 

"Who cares?" drawled the fair-haired half-breed, planting his hands on his hips and tipping his head to one side as he scrutinized the general with a worrisome air of interest. "Now that you're done talking to my dad, I guess that makes you now all ours." 

The dark-haired child bobbed his head enthusiastically, his bangs falling into his wide-set eyes. "Yeah! We found you, so that means we get to keep you!" 

" 'Keep' me?" Nappa was slightly amused and considerably peeved—but mostly horrified. "What the hell do you brats think I am, a goddamned _pet_?" 

The two children exchanged looks, completely unruffled by his outburst. 

"Well, _no_," the prince's offspring said matter-of-factly, "but you're the only one who didn't need to go to a hospital after five minutes of playing with us." 

"Yeah," the smaller child put in helpfully, then displayed a rather abundant set of pearly baby teeth. "And you're _fun_." 

Nappa stared down at the youngsters' keen, shining faces, and had the sinking feeling that he might have been safer with the prince. 

* * *

The Saiyan who accosted them next was a female. 

She was Celipa's antithesis, at least in appearance: where Celipa was compact and well built, she was tall and sinuously lanky; where Celipa's hair was cut short and practical, hers was a generous sweep of tousled raven tresses that rivaled Raditz's in thickness and length. And instead of adhering to the standard female Saiyan's cat-like eye shape, hers were round and contoured, her pupils large and expressive and stunningly familiar. 

Unfortunately, that was where the similarity between her and Son Goku ended. 

"Who the hell are you?" the female snapped, maneuvering herself between Bardock and the two intruders. "What are you doing here? You are not welcome here!" To her fellow Saiyans, she snarled, "Are you all out of your goddamned minds?" 

The others seemed properly castigated—even Celipa seemed subdued—all except for Bardock, who said evenly, "Actually, Kyuuri, I was the one who let them here." 

The female swung toward him. "You crazy son of a bitch," she snarled. "What makes you think they're any different from all of those morons hunting you down?" 

Bardock met her fiery gaze with his own cool one. "I saw them in my visions. They're from the Living World." 

The two of them locked stares for several intense moments, waging a silent, familiar war of wills. Finally Kyuuri backed down and averted her eyes. 

"Your visions," she groused. "Or so you call them. Sometimes, Bardock, I wonder if you really are insane, instead of merely pretending to be." 

Bardock glowered at her, looking simultaneously amused and vexed by her attitude. "Woman, sometimes _I_ wonder why the hell you left the others down there and traveled all the way up here if not to nag me for the rest of eternity." 

"You know, sometimes I wonder about that, too," Kyuuri shot back, her tone dripping with sarcasm. "Anyway, it's not like I can count on this bunch of yours to watch your sorry ass, especially since they did such an exceptional job last time." Here she scowled pointedly at the rest of Bardock's crew, who deigned to put up any defense on their behalf. Even Celipa, whom Shin had taken to be the most strong-willed one of the group, seemed unwilling to dispute her. 

"What I see is real to me, Kyuuri," Bardock intoned crisply. "And the flashes—they've gotten worse. They're coming faster now, more frequently. Sometimes the meditation almost doesn't seem enough." 

"That's right," Raditz volunteered, addressing the longhaired female. "He's been more restless than usual. Of course, he still won't tell me what he's been seeing." 

"I don't need to tell anyone what I've been seeing, boy," Bardock retorted. "I wouldn't wish this damned abilities of mine on anyone, except maybe Frieza. But even he would have been driven insane long before the future he would have seen for himself would have come to pass." He turned back toward Shin and Kibito, his countenance stony. "And lately I've been having even more visions regarding my son." 

"Your son?" Kyuuri raised an elegant eyebrow and tossed a glance toward the longhaired male. "What about Raditz? Does something loom in his future? Or have you been sowing your third-class oats around the galaxy while I was tending to our sad excuse of a household?" 

Bardock actually reddened at her insinuation. "Don't be ridiculous, woman. I would never—Raditz wasn't our only offspring, or did you forget?" 

The Supreme Kai glanced between the two Saiyans, his mind reeling. Could it really be? he thought. Goku's parents, Gohan's grandparents—how could it be possible that the antecedents of two of the most pure-hearted souls he had ever met could belong in Hell? 

Kyuuri's expression didn't vacillate, but for a semi-second the Supreme Kai saw a shadow move behind her eyes. "Sometimes I do, actually," she murmured, and her voice, stripped of its earlier asperity, sounded vastly different. "I don't think I ever really saw him. It might've been a dream, for all I know." 

It was evident that the subject of her youngest son was one she rarely breached; the other Saiyans observed her with a blend of muted curiosity and bemusement. 

"He wasn't even born with a power level," Kyuuri went on distantly. "Wasn't worth the months I had to carry him. I'm not sorry they decided to send him away; it wasn't as though he wasn't going to amount to anything." 

Shin was almost overpoweringly tempted to tell her that she could not have been more wrong, but he kept his mouth shut. The damned in Hell could never be privy to any sort of outside knowledge, after all. 

Bardock, despite seeming to be the sole exception to this rule, did not elect to correct her. Instead he remained quiet, his eyes tracing meditatively over his mate's closed-off profile. 

"Forget Kakarrot," griped Raditz. He was staring pugnaciously at the two Kais. "You still haven't given me a straight answer. Who the hell _are_ you two? Why are you really here?" 

The Supreme Kai had long ceased to take offense at all the contempt being lobbed at him, and took it in stride. "I'm Shin, and this is Kibito. We are here conducting an investigation of what happened earlier in Hell." 

"Oh, well, that explains everything," noted Raditz, his inflection heavy with derision. "If Father says that you're from the Living World, then how could you have been able to make your way down here—unless you just died and did a lot of less than unscrupulous things during your lifetime?" 

Shin thought about explaining his status as the overall administrator of the universe, then decided that convincing them of his authenticity would take up too much time. "That is not important. What is important is that something occurred here in Hell—something that might have involved Frieza and King Cold and Cell and every last individual from Hell's top stratums..." 

The Saiyans listened with half an ear, their faces still conveying distrust, but Bardock was grimacing, his fingers pressing down hard against the bridge of his nose as though he were being were beset by a sudden migrane. 

_Kakarrot was sleeping soundly in a stone-gray room. Without warning the door broke open, and another Saiyan barged in, bloodlust in his eyes._

_He was a male, tall and wiry, with long hair that held a strange violet tint and an even stranger gold ornament adorning his forehead. Kakarrot awoke in the nick of time and was able to vacate his cot some split seconds before his would-be assassin chopped it in half. _

_The other occupants were waking up, but the Saiyan ignored them all in favor of Kakarrot. The room was reduced to shambles, and Kakarrot took it upon himself to move the tussle outside. A mustachioed man—a vaguely familiar one—rushed in from the other side of the abode, something gold gleaming in his hand and a horror-struck look stamped on his scarred countenance._

_Over the lake, Kakarrot seemed to be making a remark to his attacker. The latter, having no more use for the usual niceties, rushed toward him, only to have Kakarrot deal him a recoil-inducing kick to his face. _

_The Saiyan stopped and turned. There was a trickle of blood running down one corner of his mouth, as well as a curiously melancholy expression on his even-featured face. A second later the expression turned sinister as he cleaned off the red liquid with his tongue, the movement methodical and indolent, and smiled._

_Kakarrot cringed, and his foe lunged toward him._

The vision was interrupted, as usual, at its most critical juncture, but Bardock was already far too accustomed to the ambiguous nature of his prophetic abilities. He blinked, making the adjustment from internal vision to external one, and realized that the conversation had gone on without him. 

"...couldn't have been a Saiyan," Toma was insisting. "There's no way a Saiyan could have caused all that. Not even the king. I mean, we're strong, but not enough to tear up Hell like that—and believe me, we've already tried." 

Shin shook his head. "The ogres who were there testified that it _was_ a Saiyan. Even Cell and Frieza confirmed it. Granted, they might not be the most reliable sources around, but I don't think they had any reason to lie, given that they basically admitted that it was a Saiyan who caused them to be injured." 

"A Saiyan strong enough to actually hurt Frieza?" Pamboukin said doubtfully. "No—not possible. He's invincible. Simple as that." 

Toma ran a hand over the back of his neck. "Wait—remember when Frieza first arrived here? There were whispers that he had met his death at the hands of a Saiyan." 

"Those were just rumors, Toma," Celipa reminded him shortly. "You know better than to buy into that." 

"That's right," seconded Totepo. "Frieza's power is unfathomable. No Saiyan could stand against him." He snuck a clandestine glance toward Bardock. "The commander should know that more than anyone." 

Bardock did not hear him. 

_Frieza, divested of his helmet and protective coverings, looked vastly different from when Bardock had last seen him. Under his power-restricting armor, his entire body was sleek and milk-white—and currently a map of abrasions and some sticky purplish liquid that might have been Iceling blood._

_The lizard was lying on the ground, wedged between chunks of rubble, barely hanging on to consciousness. Some fifty feet away from where he lay were three figures—two of them bipedal, the third one less than two feet tall. They might have been talking, but the sounds of Armageddon around them were enough to drown out whatever words they might have been exchanging. The short one had stubbly, yellow-ochre skin and bulbous eyes, and the middle one was swathed in white robes, his craggy, mustachioed face lined with odd shadows. The tallest one's features were harder to pin down, however—his entire form was ablaze with a blinding golden light._

"Not a Saiyan," Bardock muttered. "A Super Saiyan." 

The others regarded him in amazement. 

"Super Saiyan? The Legendary Super Saiyan?" exclaimed Totepo. "You mean, the one we were waiting for all this time, the one that was supposed to arise every three thousand years? _That _Super Saiyan?" 

Bardock ran his thumb and index finger over the crease between his eyebrows. "Born almost on the day Frieza blew up our planet. Paragus's son." 

"Paragus?" Celipa's tone was larded with dislike. "That second-class who was always trying to curry favor from the elites?" 

Toma snapped his fingers. "Hey, I remember him. Yeah, he was kind of a brown-noser. Kept on hanging around the royal grounds like he was expecting to get invited in." 

Pamboukin could still not get over the revelation. "You gotta be kidding us, Bardock. There's no way a second-class soldier could sire the Legendary Super Saiyan." 

"Why not?" Bardock queried offhandedly. "A third-class did." He ignored the others' dumbfounded expressions and directed his next words at Shin and Kibito. "He ran into someone in the middle of the destruction. Some sickly, yellow-skinned alien wearing a cape. Looked like an oversized, overdressed flea." 

Shin could almost hear the bones in Kibito's neck click together as the latter snapped his head up in shock. 

"Babidi." The Supreme Kai had had an inkling of the extent of the wizard's involvement ever since his interview of Cell, but it was another thing entirely to actually hear it confirmed. 

Kyuuri eyed him as if his Mohawk had suddenly sprouted snakes. "What the hell is a Babidi?" 

"He's—he's a magician. He must've seen the Super Saiyan...right after he enlisted Dabura up in the Demon World." Grooves appeared on Shin's forehead as he tried to piece together a workable timeline in his head. "The Demon World is only one level above this one. He went there to fetch Dabura—and then, for some reason, he made a detour to Hell. Why?" 

"Surely he must've known there was no one down in Hell who could be more evil or more powerful than Dabura," protested Kibito. 

"Babidi? Dabura?" Raditz obviously did not appreciate being left out of the loop. "Are we supposed to know these people? What the hell are you blathering about?" 

Bardock grunted as he recalled yet another vision. 

_This time they were inside what appeared to be a spacecraft of some kind, judging from the wan, sterilized interior and the rounded walls. About twenty individuals—a menagerie of warrior-like aliens—were clustered around the same three figures from the previous vision. The short one's mouth was moving, the twin dangling protrusions at the sides of his chin quivering as he spoke. _

_The most prominent-looking one in the ranks was a gargantuan individual with large triangular ears, maize eyes, and skin the color of innards. He did not seem particularly pleased with what the flea-like alien was saying; his brows were pulled all the way down as he gestured toward the two taller figures._

_To the immediate left of the short alien was a holographic viewing device of some sort. It shuddered violently as the room was flooded with a now-familiar golden glow. Bodies flew past to imbed themselves into the domed walls like shrapnel, and the overhead lights began to shatter one by one. The entire room shook and began to bulge outwards._

_The salmon-skinned demon wasn't faring much better; he had tried to strike the younger of the two individuals, and had paid for it when the latter seized his arm. After getting over his surprise, the demon tried to yank his arm back, several times, but to no avail. His efforts came to an end as his antagonist wrapped his fingers around his throat._

"...what's wrong?" Toma was asking him. "Bardock?" 

The Saiyan commander closed his eyes for a second, then refocused them on his crew and family. "I'm fine. I was just reminiscing." 

Concern flickered past Kyuuri's features before she replaced it with a guise of sternness. "Are you having those episodes again?" 

"No, not yet. It's just...the conversation. It's triggering some memories...things I saw." 

Raditz glowered at the two Kais. "Now do you see what your presence here has done? My father's had enough to deal with without you two coming in here and screwing even more with his mind—" 

"They can't possibly screw up my mind any more than these visions can, Raditz," Bardock told him. He seemed to be seething with sudden fury; his son's words had evidently torn a bandage off of an old hurt. "Some of the things I see—do you know how often I have been tempted to tell you, all of you, what I've seen, what I know? There've been times, so many times, that I thought I would go insane with all this forbidden knowledge crammed into my head, knowing that I could never share it with anyone! And now _you_"—he whirled toward Shin and Kibito, his onyx eyes ablaze—"come all the way down here to ask me to share that knowledge with you, correct?" 

Shin was slightly taken aback. "Actually...yes." 

Even after what seemed like an eternity of the mental assaults, Bardock would never get used to the way his visions arrived; sometimes they were subtle, not so much striking him as interweaving themselves through his everyday thoughts. But more often than not they struck with the ruthlessness and inexorability of a meteor shower, testing his synapses for their limits. 

_There was Kakarrot defending himself as several opponents came at him from every which way: a lanky green-skinned alien, another green-skinned individual albeit with pointed ears and a lighter skin tone, an exceptionally short Earthling male, another man possessed of a third eye on his forehead, and a host of other attackers._

"Do you think," Bardock managed to say through his gritted teeth, "that if I tell you the future, you might somehow be able to change it?" 

The Supreme Kai looked at a loss. "I..." 

Bardock grimaced again; the images were inundating him now, fast and furious, each one exploding before his mind's eye like bolts of lightning: quick, blinding, intense. 

_Kakarrot was standing, head bent, hands clenched, eyes hooded. Someone was circling around him, stopping only to whisper something into his ear. Kakarrot's response was to throw his head back and scream, and everything turned white._

"You can't change what's going to happen," Bardock growled, his shoulders slumping with the burden of a failure that had haunted him long beyond his own death. "Do you understand what I am saying? You _can't change anything._" And then, almost inaudibly, he added, "I, of all people, should know that." 

_Prince Vegeta stood, his expression unreadable, as a number of individuals in Saiyan armor bowed deeply before him. Behind him was General Nappa, gawping openly._

"I read about you," Shin ventured. "You were the Saiyan who tried to save planet Vegeta single-handedly. You must've seen what was going to happen in your visions." 

"That's right—I tried. And I failed," Bardock informed him, his tone harsh. "I have watched my own planet explode in my mind a hundred thousand times, and every time I'm reminded of how laughable it was for me to believe that I could change anything." 

_In the midst of what seemed to be the ops room of a Saiyan space vessel was Prince Vegeta, studying a read-out on the central console. A female in Saiyan armor insinuated herself between him and the monitor with the read-out, perching herself insolently on the edge of the comp station. The prince stared up at her, his countenance inscrutable, and she tilted her body slowly forward._

"Do you know how it feels," he went on raggedly, "to see and know every detail of your impending death? To personally witness the destruction of your whole planet while it still lies under your feet? To watch a madman take pleasure in turning your race to dust, to watch him drink wine and celebrate after he's murdered everyone you've ever given a damn about?" 

The other Saiyans stared at him, dumfounded, and Shin realized that this was probably their first real glimpse into the workings of their commander's "gift". 

"I saw everything that was going to happen," the scarred Saiyan went on passionately. "I _knew _it was going to happen. I was right there. I could have...there were a million different factors I could've affected, a million other choices I would've made, a million other ways history might have gone. But that doesn't matter, does it? Because the truth is that no matter what I could've done, no matter how hard I could've tried, I wouldn't have been able to change a thing. Not a damned thing." 

_The surrounding area was now nothing more than a wasteland; ki blasts had scalloped the ground here and there, the nearby hills and rock cliffs had been all but flattened. At the crux of the devastation was the Super Saiyan, his massive hand closed around the curve of Kakarrot's skull, smiling that same unsettling smile._

Bardock passed a hand over his eyes, sorting his physical vision from his metaphysical ones. "I have learned the truth long ago—all of us truly are insignificant and worthless, and nothing any of us can do will ever truly make a difference." 

"You can't possibly believe that," Shin argued, trying not to show his dismay. Whatever spark of hope he had nursed ever since he had come face-to-face with the prophetic Bardock was in mortal danger of being extinguished. "The future can't ever be set in stone, not when there are still people out there who aren't going to leave everything up to fate, people who don't know how to give up fighting—people like your son." 

The others had long since discarded their veneer of indifference, and were presently dividing their attention between the two Kais and their commander. Bardock merely condensed his eyes into slits, growled, and looked away. 

_High above the canyon floor were Kakarrot and Prince Vegeta, arms locked in combat, their dueling auras flaring brilliantly. The fight seemed immensely personal, at least to the prince: he looked like a man possessed, the strange rune on his forehead nearly obscured by the sheer amount of energy he was emitting, enough to shake the battleground at its foundation._

The Supreme Kai took a breath and tried again. "Listen to me. If Babidi has his way, he is going to release Majin Buu, the monster his father summoned millennia ago. And then he is going to try and finish the job his father started—the complete annihilation of everything in existence. We were able to stop Bibidi back then, but only at a horrific cost. And now his son has taken up the mantle, and _your_ son, as well as his friends, have chosen to make their stand against him and Majin Buu. Even now we believe that a Saiyan in Hell—Paragus, you said his name was—perhaps alongside Frieza and King Cold and others, conspired to aid Babidi by targeting Goku. Do you really think they would go to such elaborate lengths to get to your son if they didn't think that he could somehow make a difference?" 

Bardock worked a muscle in his jaw, mulling this over. Beside him Kyuuri glared intently at something on her mate's arm, her hurricane eyes brimming with some unidentifiable emotion. 

"What does Kakarrot have to do with all this?" she muttered, almost to herself. "Are you saying that Frieza and King Cold conspired something in Hell just to get back at my son? He's just a third-class weakling! He's supposed to be living out his insignificant little life on some dirt-ball planet, not pissing off people who could kill him ten times over! What the hell did he ever do to them?" 

Shin regarded her in surprise; for all the put-downs she had laid upon her youngest son, he couldn't help but wonder if Kyuuri had an inkling of what kind of man "Kakarrot" had grown up to be. 

Bardock touched her elbow. "Kyuuri," he said gruffly. 

His mate tried half-heartedly to shrug off his hand, but Bardock held on. His next words stalled in his throat; the barrage of images bombarding his brain was being capped off by one starkly final vision. 

_The planet Earth, Kakarrot's adopted home, a blue sphere wreathed with white, exploded into oblivion._

He scrubbed a hand over his lids, willing the violence of the fading image to dissipate before his mind's eye, and transferred his gaze toward the Supreme Kai. "This Babidi you mentioned," he began. "If I tell you what I have seen, you will see to it that he is stopped?" 

"That has been my intention from the very start," Shin reassured him. 

The Saiyan commander exhaled sharply. "Look, I—these visions...I just can't close my eyes and pull up whatever I need to know. They're random. Just...flashes of images, things like that. Sometimes even I can't even make sense of them." He paused. "The only thing they have had in common is that, as far as I know, they have all come to pass." 

Shin nodded in understanding. "Nonetheless, I'm sure that whatever information you can provide us with would be immensely helpful." 

Bardock passed his hands over his face again; as disjointed and fleeting as these last visions had been, something about them tugged insistently at his subconscious. There had been something off about them, a minute but infinitely significant bit of detail that had escaped him earlier. It was Kakarrot, he thought: something about his second son in this latest set of visions had seemed off, like it wasn't even his _son_ he was seeing at all— 

"Raditz," he said. 

The longhaired male jerked up as if taken aback by the sound of his father pronouncing his name. "What?" 

Bardock didn't answer him right away; instead he stared intently past him, his gaze fixed on some indeterminate point over his son's shoulder. 

Just as Raditz was about to turn his head to find out just what was so damned interesting, his father finally spoke, but not before he leveled him an enigmatic look. "Don't you try to kill your sister this time." 

Raditz goggled, his eyebrows shooting up and nearly scraping the top of his widow's peak. "My _sister_? Since when do I—and what do you mean, this ti—" 

By then it was too late; scarcely had the words spilled from his mouth when his entire being burst into an inferno of silver-blue light. The brilliance of it easily permeated the surrounding mist, sending the subterranean shadows into temporary retreat. 

By the time the others had finished blinking the glare spots from their eyes, the light was gone, and so was Son Goku's brother. 

* * *

End of Chapter Eight  


* * *

**Closing Notes:** And Raditz makes, er, four? Five? Ah, well... ^^ As usual, the chapter was getting too long, so I snipped out the last section with the dragonball hunt; it wasn't really that important, anyhow. And just in case anyone wanted to know, the name "Kyuuri" was derived from the Japanese translation of "cucumber". I based her physical description on a doujinshi that was featured on "Hey Monkey", an awesome Bardock shrine.   
  
Writing the final Shin/Bardock exchange was unexpectedly difficult; I must've gone through at least four drafts. Even now it looks like it still needs some tinkering with. I did have fun with the "visions", though—and yes, they're all upcoming scenes for this fic. I really do have a method to my madness. :) I even have the ending all planned out; it's just a matter of filling out the middle to get there. Something tells me I'm going to have to do an alternate ending, though... ~_~;;   
  
Oh, and by the way, I stumbled on two other girl-Goku fics—"Dragonball C Change" by Callimoqua and "Onnafied" by Miyanon—just in case anyone was interested. I know I am. ^^ Unfortunately, I guess this means my fic premise's no longer one of a kind, huh? ;) Oh, well, that's one problem I'm all too glad to have. Thanks again to those who e-mailed me or stated in their reviews where to find the stories! As always, reviews are little pep pills for this writer's creative impulses...   
  
_ **Next: **Goku __really_ embarks on the re-training (with a little help from Heaven), the dragonball hunt _really _runs into a (Legendary) complication, Nappa and Vegeta (and Trunks and Goten) make some discoveries in their search for Paragus, and of course, someone's brother just complicates matters.   
  


   [1]: mailto:buslot_sando@hotmail.com



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